The nineteenth Leamington Music Winter Season opens at the Royal Pump Rooms with something rather special this year – a whole weekend with the Brodsky Quartet and Dmitri Shostakovich. This is an opportunity that doesn’t come around very often and is absolutely not to be missed.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will spot that we have updated the names of our core series this time: the International String Quartets series becomes ‘Leamington Music at the Royal Pump Rooms’, and the Early Music series becomes ‘Leamington Music at St Mary’s Church, Warwick’. The catalyst for these changes was our inclusion last year of the Rachmaninoff Vespers in our Early Music series which felt somewhat incongruous…! Updating the names of our series allows us just a little more freedom to expand our horizons although, of course, the heart of each series remains unchanged – String Quartets in the Royal Pump Rooms and Early Music in St Mary’s – but we open up the opportunity (as last year) for more.
This season we welcome the Doric, Jubilee, and Coull Quartets back to Leamington and add an exciting new ensemble to our roster in the Fibonacci Quartet – a fresh, young group with all four members from a different European country who are making waves in the great concert halls and Festivals across the world. We finish that series with a rather different kind of quartet in the form of Raga Garage who bring us an intoxicating fusion of East and West to enlighten and entertain.
Each concert in the series in St Mary’s Church, Warwick is introduced this year by a free pre-concert talk where we invite you to take a closer look ‘Behind the Music’. Before Christmas, we focus on vocal and choral music with The Gesualdo Six, The Binchois Consort, and Clare College Choir all back by popular demand. In 2025, the Monteverdi String Band with soprano Hannah Ely and lutenist Toby Carr take us to Italy to reimagine the Madrigal, and our season concludes with another new young group – Rune – who, championed by the Brighton Early Music Festival, are making strides to reacquaint audience ears with the true delights of Mediaeval music which has inexplicably dropped off the Early Music radar in this country in recent years, and which is much deserving of a “comeback”.
Of course, no Leamington Music season would be complete without our double-concert day from Ensemble 360; this year’s Family Concert is Giddy Goat and the afternoon chamber concert features works by Britten, Coleridge-Taylor, Holbrooke, and Dvořák.
We wish you great enjoyment of the music to come this year and look forward to sharing every note with you!
Helen Beecroft, Artistic Director