Tips For Hiring a Last Minute Wedding String Quartet – On Friday the Manor House String Quartet were presented with a slight problem. One of our viola players who was due to be contributing to yesterday’s wedding music at Hinchingbrook House (as part of a string duo with myself on violin) called us from Northern Ireland to say that as the planes were all grounded due to volcanic ash (from the recently erupted Volcano in Iceland), he was unable to get back to England and would have to ‘deputise’ his position. For a moment, I had a dreadful image of confronting the bride and groom with the worst excuse of all time: sorry there are only three players in your wedding quartet, but it’s all down to volcanic ash from Iceland…..(gasps of disbelief).

Tips For Hiring a Wedding String Quartet — The Manor House String Quartet all looking none the worse for the occasional spot of volcanic ash in the air….

Anyhow, as the player in question is a true professional, he straight away contacted eight other viola players who are all of an equivalent standard and play regularly with our group anyway. Luckily a player responded within 10 minutes and after a couple of phonecalls, she had all the details in her diary and was ready to turn up early to the wedding venue so that a couple of special pieces for the ceremony could be rehearsed to a polished standard. After playing the first couple of lines absolutely flawlessly, we all agreed that we were ready to play at the wedding.

You can read more about this particular issue on the FAQs page of our website. The question about musicians being ill or indisposed on the morning of a wedding is something that concerns many brides and grooms and regularly comes up in the earliest stages of being booked for a particular wedding. It’s something that all groups need to plan for. In our particular quartet, over the last ten years we have built up a player base of around ten instrumentalists per instrument, all who have played our repertoire before and who can simply turn up on the day and slot in perfectly. In order to be able to do this, we only have the very best players performing with us: players who are at home recording film soundtracks, playing West End shows and touring with London’s leading orchestras.