Chetham's School of Music

6.30pm – Pre-concert talk with Paul Cassidy (included in the ticket price)

Plenty of teenagers dream about becoming a rock star but how many 10yr olds dream about becoming a world-beating string quartet, and then go ahead and do it? Following on from Paul Cassidy’s popular prequel, Get Beethoven!, Got Beethoven is a brutally honest and relentlessly entertaining account of what it’s like to be in a band. All the fun, angst, rewards and toil are brought to life and given the authority that can only come from actually living the life. 

7.30pm – Live concert  

‘Playing with a spirit so transformational you felt they were actually improving the world’—The Strad

In 2022 British string quartet, The Brodsky Quartet are celebrating their 50th anniversary.

Performing a programme which includes Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.11, Elgar and Barber octets and a live performance with Chetham’s School of Music students, the concert will celebrate their extraordinary fifty-year legacy of music-making.

The Brodsky Quartet has been making arrangements throughout its fifty year existence. Initially for encores with material often from the piano or even orchestral repertoire creatively rearranged for the quartet.

The wonderful octet of Mendelssohn is one of the classics of the chamber music canon but there is precious little else for that combination of instruments. So it was, when some years ago, they were invited to play that piece with another quartet at the Perth Festival in Australia, they decided to create a full concert programme of octets.

It was so much fun that, some years later, when they had a similar opportunity to play octets at the Bratislava Festival, the octet arrangements were augmented to make a full programme which for their Stoller Hall performance will include Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.11, Elgar and Barber octets and a live performance with Chetham’s School of Music students.