Chapel Street Music: Chair’s report for 2025
Concerts . We continued our now-established sequence of concerts in Penzance with another Spring and Autumn series. There were ten concerts, seven of which were given by the Ensemble, and we were delighted to welcome three excellent guest artists to perform: the Brodsky Quartet, Trio Bohemo and Matthew McKinney (tenor). Chapel Street Winds is now established as a high quality group with its own profile, and programming has been enhanced with the occasional involvement of Cornish-based singers, something which audiences have clearly welcomed.
Audiences have, pleasingly, stabilised at around the 60/70 mark, with occasional fluctuations upward, notably for our 2024 Christmas Concert and for the Brodsky Quartet, where numbers were close to 200. We have a mailing list of 160 plus and plan to continue to grow our support.
Local charities . We have been unable to continue launching each series with a ‘free’ concert for a local charity, due to player availability, but in 2025, as in 2024, all interval donations from the December concert will go to Breadline, the local Penzance charity for the homeless.
Other concerts . The Ensemble, and its associated groups, continues to be active performing outside the Penzance area. There were concerts at the Piggery (near Liskeard) in September, the Wind Quintet performed for Carrick Concerts on the Roseland in October, the string quartet played at Probus church in June, and string players have continued to work with Live Music Now in delivering events in the St Austell and the Truro area. The Ensemble is keen to continue to take concerts and programmes county-wide beyond the Penzance area and are actively seeking further opportunities, and venues who might be interested in developing a relationship with CSM. There are further concerts planned for 2026, supported by Carn to Cove, at different venues in Cornwall.
Finance and funding . We continue to be in a reasonably healthy financial situation and are still spending money previously raised from different funding sources judiciously. We have been able to raise the level of players’ fees to acknowledge their work, quality and contribution. Currently each concert in Penzance ‘costs’ roughly £200 - £300 to mount over and above our box office income. Of course, this does not represent a long term financial strategy. Therefore we will need to continue to both develop our audience reach and seek further fund raising opportunities in the future. We are planning to launch a Friends of CSM group in 2026, to further support our activities and vouchsafe the future of Chapel Street Music.
Other events . We appeared again in the Golowan Festival, with a ‘family-friendly’ version of Little Red Riding Hood, with Kesha Darling as performer / narrator. While the response was warm, the young audience is still something with which we have not been able to regularly and significantly connect, and we may decide to not appear in the 2026 Festival.
Schools / education work. We continued our education work in partnership with Cornwall Music Services Trust, with a schools day in Penzance in May, and we also spent a day in April on the north coast, with a morning workshop in St Ives and an afternoon in St Just,8) working with different local schools. Feedback was excellent, and we both hope and plan to develop our work in these areas in the future.
Volunteers and Trustees . Both volunteers and trustees continue to do excellent work. The group of Trustees has been both strengthened and diversified by the addition of two new members earlier in the year, with fresh faces in the position of both Treasurer and Secretary. Recently we were pleased to also welcome a new coordinator, Maggie Warwick, to pull together the efforts of all our hard working volunteers.
Tim Dean 9 December 2025
Finance statement- Jan – Dec 2025
Opening Balance 1/1/25 19,662.15 Closing balance 29/12/25 10,042.49
Expenditure
| Advertising | 95.00 |
|---|---|
| General | 418.20 |
| Insurance | 499.00 |
| PRS | 317.82 |
| Outside | 5,518.7 |
| players | 5 |
| 10,130. | |
| Players | 15 |
| Printing | 754.90 |
| 3,845,0 | |
| Rent | 0 |
| Travel | 334.28 |
| Tuner | 160.00 |
| Website | 198.78 |
Income
Grants 2,700.0
9,952.2 Tickets