2026 AGM

At the end of July, we held the Annual General Meeting for the Quinte Society for Chamber Music.

This year’s AGM was much smaller than last year’s 10-year anniversary, but we still have much to celebrate!

Artistic Director Report

This past year was very successful overall for QSCM! We collaborated with the Madoc Fair in mid-Sept 2025 where the Madoc Quartet performed and did outreach in the arena among the vendor booths. We managed to reach several new audience members, many of whom had never heard a string quartet live before. For the first time, QSCM also worked with StirlingFest, with the Madoc Quartet doing a full concert in mid-October last year as part of their annual fall concert series.

We also had a successful collaboration with medieval music trio, Comtessa, from Montreal. We are hoping to be able to include them again in the 2026 All Terrain Tour since they will once again be touring in Ontario around the end of September and early October. I will reach out to them to inquire about their fees.

We held a community event for QSCM at the beginning of February at Dune Hopper Brewery in Picton, featuring the Madoc Quartet performing winter-themed and light classical works. The aim of this event was to establish connections in that region since the majority of QSCM performances in recent years have been up in Hastings County. We hope to continue to build these connections in Prince Edward County in order to do more programming in that area in the future.

We look forward to another All Terrain Tour featuring the Madoc Quartet as the featured artists in Fall 2026. We are aiming to establish more community connections between July and early October, with the main performances of the ATT with the quartet being sometime between late October to early December. While these performance dates are later in the season than we have done in previous years, these later dates will avoid other chamber music series that run in Prince Edward County earlier in the fall.

It is also worth noting that we remain committed to not using generative artificial intelligence in any of our social media posts or captions, or any of our promotional materials, including posters. Since many arts organizations are unfortunately using generative AI in their marketing, we hope that our posts and materials will stand out as seeming more genuine and personable.

Respectfully submitted,
Sarah de Niverville
QCSM Artistic Director

A few words from Sebastian Sallans, our Board Chair:

ACCESSIBILITY VIA NON-TRADITIONAL VENUES

QSCM continued to access novel as well as traditional venue access setting up performances in the social area of an equine riding establishment. The ever-versatile Madoc Quartet also continues to offer unique experiences on an ad hoc basis, including performing at pop up locations throughout prince Edward County and Hastings

LOOKING AHEAD

QSCM continues to strive to retain the best of what we’ve learned that works, while improving, developing and growing in every way.

The goal remains the same: make classical music at its best accessible to all in our rural communities regardless of socioeconomic background and cultural experience. We are extremely grateful to our volunteers, donors, and audience without whom none of this would be possible.

Regards
Sebastian Sallans
QSCM Chair