The Doric Quartet set to open 2020-21 Chichester Chamber Concerts

The Doric Quartet open the 2020-21 Chichester Chamber Concerts series which will go ahead in extraordinary times (Thursday, Oct 1, 7.30pm).
The Doric QuartetThe Doric Quartet
The Doric Quartet

Concerts will be once a month until March in the Assembly Room, but seats will be limited to approximately 40 (against a usual capacity of around 170), with tickets available from Chichester Festival Theatre (https://www.cft.org.uk/chichester-chamber-concerts).

But to help accommodate the usual demand, the concerts will also be live-streamed on YouTube, with online viewers asked to make a donation.

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John Myerscough, cellist with the quartet, is delighted to be back in business: “It has been a very, very difficult time for sure. There have been a lot of negatives, but there have been some positives as well. It has been a sabbatical that we were not expecting, but I think time apart means that we are in a healthier state as an ensemble than we were before. One of the big things through lockdown was thinking about what we missed most and what we were missing most, and I think it just gave you time to think. And I think that now, the actual performance experience, the actual experience of being together and playing together, just the four of us, is very much heightened.”

It was never a question of going through the motions, but maybe there was a sense of taking for granted the act of giving a concert, the ability to give a concert: “And then suddenly I think you are remembering why you do this. I never thought that we were not going to come back, but coming back now I think gives you a greater sense of the extraordinary privilege of being able to make music, to create notes and to play live in front of an audience – and also to remember how important that relationship with an audience is. That has been deeply positive.

“We quite quickly made the assumption early on that we wouldn’t have anything to do until August. We were thinking about the worst case scenario, and not everything got cancelled at the same time. It was gradually happening, and then we just started expecting things to be cancelled, but a lot of what was cancelled has now been reinstated a couple of years down the line.

“We are very fortunate as a group professionally. We are very well established. A lot of the places we go to we have already got relationships with. It is not as bad as it would have been for us ten years ago when we would have been having first trips to places cancelled and dreams shattered. This year we were meant to be going to Australia and New Zealand and that is not happening, but we have been there quite a few times and we know that we will go there again and that’s a thought that is really consoling.

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“All of us individually have had different experiences throughout the period. We have all had very low moments, really suffering from the fact that we were not playing and that we weren’t together, that every day we had nothing to do and that motivation could be incredibly difficult to find, sometimes getting through a lot of practice and then thinking ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with it!’ After a while you just get to feel ‘What is the point?’ And also it has been really weird being in the same place for six months.” All of which makes the Chichester concert so very, very special: “The Chichester concert is incredibly important to us.”

Programme: Mozart String Quartet in D major K 575; Sibelius Voces Intimae Op 56; and Haydn String Quartet Op 33 No 4.