Concerts at Cratfield
Blyth Valley Chamber Music presents six afternoon concerts on alternate Sundays each summer (July-September): the series is called Concerts at Cratfield, since for almost twenty years our concerts have taken place in the church of St Mary’s Cratfield, Suffolk (UK). Cratfield is a small village in tranquil and rolling countryside about 5 miles (8km) west of the A12, close to Halesworth and Yoxford: click here for a local map and here for further details of the church and its facilities for concertgoers. Concerts begin at 3pm, usually ending at around 5pm.
Our concerts are all of chamber music, from solo recitals, duos and trios through to string quartets and larger ensembles: piano quintets and string or wind sextets are the largest groups which can fit comfortably on the platform at the church. Most concerts are purely instrumental, but singers occasionally take part too. Our approach is simple: to invite to play for us the best young ensembles we can afford, playing pieces from the best in the repertoire to the best standard attainable by them.
We regularly feature performers with connections to the activities of Aldeburgh Music nearby: the Aldeburgh Festival in June, the winter lunchtime concerts at the Jubilee Hall and the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme at Snape. Each Cratfield season mixes well-established works from the ‘core repertoire’ with lesser known, early and new music, including first performances.
For more detail on our history and organisation, click here to go to the ‘About’ page.
New string quartet commissioned
Blyth Valley Chamber Music has commissioned a new string quartet from established British composer Timothy Salter. His Quartet no 3, for whose commission Blyth Valley Chamber Music successfully applied for support from the Radcliffe Trust, will have its first public performance at Cratfield, when the Sacconi Quartet return to play for us in July 2011.
The idea for the commission came from the quartet themselves, who are keen to perform works by living composers. The Sacconi have already played twice at Cratfield, in 2006 (with Morgan Szymanski guitar) and 2009.
Data protection – and our mailing-list
All organisations which hold and process personal data need to have clear principles and practices. This is to comply with the law, as well as to reassure those who deal with them that it is safe to let the organisation have data about them. Concerts at Cratfield has now published the first version of an annual Data Protection Statement, which can be accessed from the ‘About‘ page of this website. The document summarises the legal background and lists all the different classes of data which we hold, how we use each and the safeguards we adopt to ensure that the data is accurate, up-to-date, secure and not misused.
For our concertgoers, it is their contact information on our mailing-list which is the main data we hold, together with details of the tickets they have bought. Most of those who book by post or telephone pay with a debit or credit card, so also trust us with their card details. The new Statement makes clear that, once a ticket sale is complete, we destroy any hard copy record which could be used to link a purchaser’s name to their card details; the card details themselves are also destroyed at the same time.
In parallel, we are starting to review the whole of our mailing-list – as we do every few years. So anyone who attends any of our 2010 concerts will be asked to fill in a short form, confirming their contact details and their wish to stay on, or be added to, our mailing-list.
The form will also give everyone on the mailing-list a chance to opt out of receiving the season brochure by post, as well as any other general mailings from Concerts at Cratfield. This comes about since our website is a better source of information than our brochure: it has much more information and is regularly updated, especially with ticket availability for each concert.
Anyone who gives us an e-mail address will now be able to sign up to receive e-mail alerts about our concerts: these will include booking information (and a printable booking form) for the next season. If you are reading this ‘post’, you may be someone familiar with this website, who would welcome e-mail alerts in preference to receiving a brochure by post. Reducing the scale of our annual mailing will of course reduce our costs, as well as saving resources more generally; but everyone who would like to be sent mailings by post will still receive them (free of charge).
Lunch from ‘best deli’?
Our performers’ pre-concert lunches all come from Richard Lawson and Claire Bruce-Clayton at Lawson’s in Aldeburgh, in the High Street opposite the Post Office and Co-op; what Rose Price in the Daily Telegraph calls one of the two best delis in the country.
Open on summer Sundays from 10am, the shop offers concertgoers too all the ingredients for a superb picnic, to be enjoyed in a field off one of the lanes leading to Cratfield or in the churchyard before the concert. Click here to read Rose’s full article, which also praises the range of local food available in Suffolk and consumers’ commitment to it.
Lawson’s are now one of the final five contenders (out of 400 entrants) for ‘Deli of the Year’ nationally: click here for a report from the East Anglian Daily Times in July 2010.
For a bottle to go with your picnic, Marc Medland at marc1wines, further down the High Street on the opposite side, next to Munchies, offers a good choice of beers and carefully selected wines, many from unusual regions of both New and Old Worlds and from small producers. The shop opens at 11am on Sundays.