Hampshire Wedding String Quartet at the Tithe Barn – On Saturday the Manor House String Quartet provided music for a wedding at the Tithe Barn in Ditcham, near Petersfield down in Hampshire. The barn is terrifically spacious with easily enough room for 100 guests to dine and the underfloor heating was a real must for quite a cool October day. With an ambient acoustic, the string quartet was able to effortlessly project so that the music for the signing of the register and entrance of the bride were audible to all the guests. Here is a video of us performing an arrangement of the delightful ‘Panis Angelicus’ by Cesar Franck for string quartet:

Afterwards, the guests all found their way outside for drinks and photographs which raised a curious issue which I am sure other string quartets have also had to contend with – namely what to do when it’s just about warm enough for guests to stand outside but¬†it’s just a little too cold to play (string players fingers don’t work well in cold temperatures). The solution was for us to open the size able barn doors and take a place in the porch area playing towards the guests who were outside. It proved to be a satisfying outcome but guests who were not in the immediate vicinity of the door may have struggled to hear us clearly.¬† Nonetheless, by the end we had a healthy array of people who had also decided to come in to the warmth and had gathered round to enjoy the music we were playing, in particular the pop songs for string quartet and large repertoire of modern pieces.