AAS0910

The new brochure for the Abbotsholme Arts Society has finally landed. While the website has yet to be updated, and the information has been available since before the Festival (ie, I could have easily listed it all here before now), below are scans of the full brochure detailing this season's events. For those that care about such things, the colour is Pantone 209 and is actually the last of a sequence of colours I chose back in 2005 leading up to this season.
This year's artists include Alina Ibragimova and Cedric Tiberghien performing the complete Beethoven Violin Sonatas over three concerts, Stephen Hough with a programme linked to the year, the Schubert Ensemble, the Jerusalem Quartet, the inimitable Spiers & Boden doing an acoustic set, and the 2009 Gordon Clark Scholar Linda Barlund. Tickets for all events are available by calling the number detailed under General Information below.

patrons on rps shortlist

the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards shortlists were announced yesterday, and I was delighted to see that the Patrons of both the Lichfield Festival and the Abbotsholme Arts Society are amongst those listed. Valery Gerviev is shortlisted in the Conductor category and Steven Isserlis is shortlisted in the Instrumentalist category.
In the Concert Series and Festivals category in which we were shortlisted last year, only the East Neuk Festival is flying the flag for British festivals. Winners are announced on 12 May.

elias leaves ensemble 360

the wonderful Elias Quartet, who have performed in Lichfield during the last two festivals (photo shows them rehearsing in St Michael's) and who are performing Schubert, Britten and Mendelssohn tonight at the the Abbotsholme Arts Society, have finally made public that they are leaving Ensemble 360. This means that they will no longer be resident at Sheffield's Music in the Round. To quote from their website:

After four amazing years we have decided to leave Ensemble 360 to be able to concentrate fully on the quartet. Through the arrangements of Music in the Round, we have been fortunate to be able to make music together with some of the finest young players in the world, and get to know an incredibly supportive audience. We hope to be able to come back to Sheffield often!

...and I hope they'll come back to Lichfield often.

endellions at abbotsholme

tomorrow night the Endellion String Quartet perform at the start of the 41st Abbotsholme Arts Society season. In such an intimate space as Abbotsholme Chapel, having such consummate performers will be a thrilling experience, but I wonder whether the fact we seem to currently only have half the audience I was expecting has anything to do with the current financial doom and gloom. I guess it could have something to do with their record label listing the wrong date, or it might just be that saturday night events in deep rural Staffordshire don't really work.
Other news just in is that Jennifer Pike, performing at Abbotsholme on 20 January, has just joined the BBC New Generation Artist Scheme - brava!

the edge of region

Thank you Birmingham Post for noticing the Abbotsholme Arts Society's new season in time for your regional autumn round up. Referred to (only by me) as Lichfield Festival's little sister, it is nice that our tiny, vital Abbotsholme season still manages to raise eyebrows. You need to read the whole article to find it, but we seem to have the most adjectives

Right on the edge of our region, the amazingly enterprising Abbotsholme Arts Society kicks off its 41st season of bringing world-class performers to Abbotsholme School near Rocester, deep in Staffordshire, with a visit from the Endellion String Quartet. The programme for this October 4 event includes Haydn, Britten, Janacek and Mozart. There follows a positive cornucopia of concerts in this heady series...

I very much like how 'amazingly enterprising', 'positive cornucopia' and 'heady series' sound.

I've been working from home for the last two days because our server in the Festival Office has gone down, taking email, web and every electronic file with it. We now know why we have been loyally backing up every day.

brochure landing

the brochure for the 41st Abbotsholme Arts Society season has finally landed about 5 weeks later than originally planned. They go out in today's post and the website goes live tonight, but we've missed all the Lichfield Festival audiences which will no doubt slow bookings down.
Season kicks off with the Endellion String Quartet performing Haydn, Britten, Janáček, Mozart on 4 October. Other artists are visiting the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border from Australia, Germany, Bengal, Bulgaria, Austria and Israel, as well as from throughout the UK, so little Abbotsholme continues to punch above its weight. I guess it also gives me something to do in my eleven-month holiday from the Lichfield Festival!

behind

despite my 19 June post detailing the amount of work to get done before the 2008 Festival that had nothing really to do with the 2008 Festival, I have both the September Literature brochure and Abbotsholme Arts Society brochure still to do. At least the Abbotsholme brochure is at the printers (proofs available tomorrow) and the website has already been proofed and is just waiting for a green light to go live, the September Literature brochure is further behind than all the plans and schedules (and best of intentions) should allow. This is due to the planning of events only. I've been caught out slightly by the fact that we've brought the event forward a fortnight (otherwise I wouldn't be as behind as I'm feeling), and programming Literature events requires a slightly different way of thinking than normal performance events, especially when we aren't in daily conversations with publishing houses. I'm still learning the subtleties of dealing with literary agents, publishers' marketing departments, and directly with authors. Sometimes I get things very wrong. All the time I am trying to build up this wee event from nothing with no other history than what the Festival and the City can offer. The proximity to the main Festival is also awkward on a purely organisational level, but I only have myself to blame for that...
On top of that, the Festival's excellent designer, yellow, has just had twins.