Faronel

We are currently halfway through a two-day recording session preparing our next CD, entitled Be Merry All! With the car packed with instruments (including portative organ, recorders, buzzing winds, strings, percussion, bells and much else), not to mention recording equipment, stands and all the other paraphernalia, we set off for St Bartholomew’s Church near Heathfield to start work. Despite the best efforts of aircraft approaching Gatwick, dogs, birds, children, motorbikes and even a traction engine trying to get in on the act, we have about half of it in the bag. More details coming soon!

Wealden Music Box’s picnic concert at Pevensey Castle was blessed once again by glorious weather. We played our set, based on the theme ‘All’s fair in love and war’, three times to a capacity crowd in the dungeon, heralded by David and Michael calling the audience to attention from the battlements with the fifteenth-century war-song of the Burgundian army, L’homme armé.

We enjoyed playing for a fund-raising supper for the Mayfield Consort at Lucks Farm Barn recently. Among the delights on the menu was Faronel pie…!

1 April 2026 12.45pm

We will be performing in the church’s ‘Munch with Music’ series: you provide your own victuals and munch (quietly please – soft cheese sandwiches recommended…) while we provide the music.

St Dunstan’s Mayfield, 24 May 7.00PM

A Season to Sing is a new choral work based on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, written by Joanna L’Estrange to mark the 300th anniversary of the famous concertos. It’s being sung at St Dunstan’s church, Mayfield, with the first half of the concert featuring music performed by local school children. We are contributing three medieval works celebrating different seasons, which the children will perform with us.

Sunday 17 August, Pevensey Castle

Music Box Wealden and English Heritage are presenting another picnic and concert afternoon at Pevensey Castle this summer, and we are delighted that we are being sent back down in to the dungeon again to be one of the featured ensembles.

This year, our programme will be on the theme of ‘All’s fair in love and war…’: music about battles in love and battles in war.

More details will appear on the Music Box Wealden website in due course.

Saturday 8th February 2025 7.00pm

If you can’t make it to our concert in Crowborough on January 26th, then you can hear us at St Bartholomew’s Church, Cross-in-Hand on February 8th. Tickets are £10 on the door, or £9 for the Friends of Waldron Churches.

We are now starting to get a few dates in the diary for the autumn: we will be performing again at the Medieval Music in the Dales Festival at Bolton Castle from 12-14 September, contributing to the theme of the Medieval Instrumentarium (we have 21 different types of instrument to choose from among our collection, so no problem with that…!), and we also have a return visit to St Matthew’s, Redhill, on October 23 at 1.10pm.

The six-part radio drama based on the Lambton Worm legend, for which we recorded the incidental music, is now available here, along wth some extra content. Set in Sunderland in 1377, we used music from the 12th-14th centuries to help set the scene.

Sunday 26 January 2025, 3.00pm, Green Cottage, Crowborough, TN6 2DF

We are very pleased to report that Michael is now back in full working order and we are delighted that our next concert (postponed from May) will be a return visit to the convivial surroundings of Green Cottage for Crowborough Arts. Our original brief for this concert was to include as many instruments as we could: we have actually incorporated a couple more new ones since then, so hopefully we can fulfil it even better than before!

Sunday 11 August 5.00pm

David and Ruth are pleased to be playing at the medieval castle at Pevensey as part of an event organised by Music Box Wealden in conjunction with English Heritage: booking details here.

The audience is invited to bring a picnic to enjoy in the grounds, and there will be performances including our programme of medieval music from the 12th to 15th centuries in the unusual setting of a subterranean 13th century dungeon.

Among the works featured will be the song Ja Nuns Hons Pris, written in around 1192 by Richard the Lionheart when held as a prisoner in a dungeon in Austria. At this period, Richard was the owner of Pevensey Castle – a nice connection!