This has been a stupidly crazy week for our ensemble... 4 different programmes in the span of 7 days.... no reuse of music. Plus, both of us also have other smaller concerts in the wings at the same time. It is really quite literally survival mode for the moment, as we bat off each incoming programme... and it is sheer relief as we perform them, and they drop out of our head. But, no rest... straight onto bringing up the next one up to standard!

We did this to ourselves... we thought that the lead-in to our main chamber music concert at the end of the week would benefit from having a few lead in concerts to bring in new audience and interest from other concert goers who haven't heard of us.... and so, we figured that it would be a good idea to lead in with a busy week. In hindsight, that probably should have been spread out over a fortnight instead, but these were the available concert slots!

So, we are now about half-way through the burn-time. Two of the concerts have been completed, with an early music one on Sunday... and today, a lecture/concert on our specialisation. My wife also had to play for university recitals, and I had to sit on a panel for festival as well as doing a radio interview. Plus, I handle most of the concert patter, so I have to prepare that side of things as well.

Thankfully, our initial idea of gathering new interest and audience members has paid off... with both concerts being really well received, people seem to like the way we perform and present our Baroque and Classical repertoire, and they have started to follow us... and also immediately picking up tickets for our main event at the end of the week!

Tomorrow, we have another concert.. but this time, on modern instruments with much more modern repertoire. We do occasionally pull this stuff out of our hats... we love it, and we do it with our sort of spin on how we think the music should be performed. But it is a bit of a funny step out of our usual area of expertise! Still, there is much that is transferrable.. and I do think that much of modern "Classical" lost touch with its older spirit at some point in time.

When that is done, I managed to convince my wife to join on another radio interview. She isn't really that keen to do those sorts of things... I also don't like doing it that much, we are both quite shy... but I can change to a different public persona more easily than she does. I'm not completely comfortable with it, but I see it as similar to hiding behind my violin and letting that do the talking for me! Anyway... we will both do it...

... speaking of which, one of the concerts that just past also landed us another radio interview later in the year. And that will be a much more in-depth discussion about us and the group. Eeeeep!

Then the last thing will the main chamber music event at the end of the week. It has sold okay so far... much less than our recent one that led off our 2024 season, but that one was a weirdly record-breaking one for us! We didn't think that that level of interest would be sustained for the whole year... and it appears that we were right about that. Good to be pragmatic...

... but the ticket sales HAVE picked up quite significantly this week after our outings to try and get more attention. It is always going to be the difficult thing with a new ensemble... just getting people to notice, and to come along to hear!

We do have the flyer ready to print for our third concert, so that we can distribute that in the chamber concert at the end of the week. Each time, we are learning how to better do the administrative/logistic/publicity side of things... we are musicians, and we haven't been trained to do that sort of thing, so we are learning... making mistakes, but getting better each time!

I will have to finish writing up the programme booklet tomorrow... after the concert! Printing needs to be done on Thursday or Friday... earlier the better, so that we have a bit of a disaster buffer... just in case, you never know if there is some unexpected delay with the printer company!

Okay... fast brain dump over. Time to refocus on surviving the weeek!

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