On Tuesday I attended two: a school's concert organised by Cavatina Trust with the Carducci Quartet in the morning and a crossover event with Stringfever at the Bloomsbury Theatre in the evening. They were very different events, but both could legitimately claim to be bringing classical music to a new, and young audience.
The Carducci quartet is a fine string quartet who performed pieces as diverse as Haydn and Webern to show the primary school children a taste of the range chamber music can offer. They also offered insights into how a chamber quartet manages without a conductor:- they breathe together. The children were encouraged to let the quartet know what emotional impact several of the pieces had on them, and it was astonishing how often the children instinctively understood the music. Throughout the one hour session, the children were completely captivated as the quartet interspersed chamber music with games to explain how the music was constructed. These 7 - 11 year olds had plenty of opportunities to be involved with the music, to move and to think, and as such it was a great success.
The evening concert was somewhat harder to categorise. Stringfever is made up of family - three Broadbent brothers and a cousin, Graham, who was a founder member of the Carducci Quartet. Stringfever play electric (Violectra) instruments, and at the start of their concert last night it looked as if I was attending a rock concert rather than classical, but by the end I was convinced that it was doing the job of giving classical music to a crowd of people of all ages, many of whom probably wouldn't have attended a “straight” classical concert. Certainly there were medleys of well known film music, and some extremely competent beatboxing from the youngest brother. (If you don't know this is worth checking out on youtube: it is vocal percussion!) Stringfever did include the irrestible Hungarian dance, “To Life - dance” by Jerry Bock from Fiddler on the Roof and a superb, despite being electric, arrangement of Albinoni's Adagio which held the audience in complete silence. The highpoints for the children included Ravel's Bolero, played by the four men on one bright red cello, and a “History of Music in Five Minutes” which took us through from Elizabethan music to the Beatles and beyond. I loved the fact that the final encore played by Stringfever was Bohemian Rhapsody which owes a great debt to opera. I think it is wonderful that such a successful and iconic rock tune can get so much from opera, and classical and hopefully we shall see more of these innovative classical rock crossovers in the future.