Surround Sound Sessions

Surround Sound Sessions is the Gildas’s award winning performance concept which has already won the quartet the Audience Engagement Prize at the 2018 chamber music competition in Graz ‘Franz Schubert und die Musik der Moderne’.

We play in our quartet because for us it is a thrilling and addictive experience to spend our lives surrounded by the sound and energy that four string instruments create together. In many ways, at a concert we think we probably have the best seats in the house.

We wanted to find a way to open up the quartet and let our audience in too, without the distance of a concert platform. We are offering short, intimate performances where as a listener you are the one seated in the middle, with us - the quartet - spaced out so that the audience is immersed from all sides. This way dialogue and textures are opened up to you like never before, and you experience the full drama of the music unfolding around you in live ‘surround sound’.

A typical session will centre on only one quartet work and will last around an hour. We would like to give everyone a chance to lose
themselves in the music, and we think that a single but intense musical experience can sometimes have even more impact than an entire recital programme.

Have you ever been to a concert and felt that the first piece on the programme passed by all too quickly, with your mind still half caught up in the events of the day? Have you felt like you wanted to rewind and hear bits of the music again? We would like to break down a barrier or two to help with this. We’ll start the session off by talking with our listeners about the piece and the interesting things we’ve discovered while we were working on it, and we’ll play you parts of it before you hear the whole thing, so you can get to know it a bit better. We’ll even play you some of it again afterwards if you like. The longer we live with a piece of music, the more it means to us. We think our listeners will find the same.

In the run-up to a Surround Sound Session, we offer to share some short videos with you about the music and let you in on our rehearsal process a little bit. We might chat about our favourite recording of the music we’re playing, and share a quick preview from our rehearsal. It won’t be anything very formal, but we’d love you to dip in and get a flavour of what’s to come.

We will be performing in all sorts of venues including schools, universities, offices and private houses, as well as more conventional
concert venues. These performances are ideally aimed at an audience of 30-40 people.

If you are interested in booking a Surround Sound Session for your school, workplace or for a private occasion, please get in touch - we’d love to hear from you.