I absolutely love Bedford Music Club. It organises ‘chamber music’ concerts; music for small groups of instruments, such as string quartets. I found them because as a teenager I was briefly interested in composing music, and discovered I liked Beethoven’s late string quartets in particular. They were not only amazing, but felt secret because I found them, and they were written while he was deaf. So around 2015 I was drawn towards a performance of one of them at the Bedford Music Club.
They usually hold six or seven concerts per year I believe, with a variety of musical ensembles. Such is the nature of the classical music scene, that it is possible to attract world class musicians to even Bedford.
The regular audience is an impressive size. The venue I’ve been to is Bunyan Meeting and usually the seats on the floor are full, though there is also an upper floor so there’s room for more.
I usually try to catch the string quartet concerts. My highlights include: Beethoven’s late quartets, mentioned above; Dvorak’s American quartet, written while the composer was in America longing for his Czech home; Britten’s 2nd string quartet, inspired by the second world war; finally, a concert which was this year though it seems an eternity ago (before covid), which was a lutenist called Matthew Wadsworth along with a soprano singer. As a guitar maker, it was brilliant to see not only the lute in action, but the impressive theorbo, which is in the lute family but has an enormous swan neck and more strings. His smaller lute had amazing projection with a penetrating tone which hung in the air. The tone of the lute sounds like something raw and ancient. There is an example of Matthew Wadsworth’s work below.
While I was researching for this blog post, I found The Bedford Music Club has a new website and are live-streaming some concerts in the new year which I recommend:
https://www.bedfordmusicclub.com/