The Chamber Music Weymouth concert series, brainchild of pianist Duncan Honeybourne, (and known originally as the Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts) was launched at the Weymouth Arts Centre in the summer of 2002. Having played for many lunchtime recital series up and down the country in his own concert career, Honeybourne, then 25, had returned to his home town earlier that year and longed to bring regular high quality lunchtime concerts to his own corner of Dorset. He was also keen to establish a platform for chamber music partnerships with friends, to invite friends and colleagues to explore the area, to promote young artists and to try out his own solo programmes. He wanted to build up a loyal audience willing to trust his artistic judgement and give unusual repertoire a hearing as part of a regular series.
The Weymouth Arts Centre had earlier been a setting for some of Duncan’s own teenage successes. He had played concertos there, with Angela Nankivell (1938-2011) conducting the Arts Centre Orchestra, and it was with Angela – a much-loved driving force in Dorset music – that he now drew up a plan for action. Angela, a musician and teacher of rare quality, was by this time – in retirement from the Dorset Music Service – immersing herself in helping the Weymouth Arts Centre evolve and grow, and Duncan tells the story of the chance conversation in which the idea of the Lunchtime Chamber Concerts was born. One day he drove into the car park opposite the Arts Centre and, whilst searching for a parking space, he spotted Angela walking across the car park – with a question for him. “I’m glad I’ve seen you”, she exclaimed. “I’m trying to help the Arts Centre find ways to increase their profile and get people in. Have you got any ideas?” “Yes!” replied Duncan without hesitation. “Why don’t you start a lunchtime concert series?” “Good idea”, said Angela. “Would you like to run it? I’ll do the admin and you can do the artistic side.” By the time he had parked his car, a new strand of Duncan’s future work was sealed. “I had been thinking how much fun it would be to start something like that”, he remembers. “It was something that had to be done, and it was just the right moment in my life for it.”
“We decided to try a summer series on all the Thursdays in August that year,” Duncan recalls. “I gave the first one myself, and the series was such a success that we decided to make it a regular thing. We haven’t stopped since!”
Duncan says that several of his own philosophies have been hard-wired into the raison d’être of the concert series. “Firstly, I abhor the snobbery, elitism and exclusivity which so often attaches itself to classical music. I wanted to create a cosy, welcoming and all-embracing atmosphere, and always to present the music in such a way as everyone felt comfortable, involved and valued. The artists almost always talk to the audience, telling them their own feelings about the works. I’ve always been passionate that you don’t have to have any kind of background in music to get something out of it. It’s all about how you deliver and contextualise it. This sense of dialogue, of our sharing the works we love, aims to foster that very ethos”.
“We’ve also tried to keep admission costs low,” Duncan continues, “because we don’t want money to be a bar to anyone coming to enjoy first class professional music. South Dorset isn’t the wealthiest of areas these days, and I don’t want my concerts to be the preserve of a privileged few, just because they’re the only people who can afford to come. Music provides spiritual and emotional nourishment – just look at what they do in that amazing world of music therapy – and I want that to be on offer to all who would like to be part of the experience.”
Duncan’s second objective has been to support young musicians at the beginning of their careers – “I was one myself, in fact, when I started the whole thing”, he observes with a laugh – and to present a wide and challenging range of music, stepping far beyond the established and well-loved masterpieces of the baroque, classical and romantic repertoire. “The old favourite pieces are there, of course”, he is quick to reassure, “but we are able to take far bigger risks in our regular series than the average music club or concert society would be able to do.” Duncan points out that the concerts receive no outside funding, being entirely dependent on the current modest £5 admission charge.
After less than two years in their original home, the concerts had to move to a new venue. The Weymouth Arts Centre closed in 2004 and the series moved permanently to St Mary’s Church in September that year. “The church is a beautiful setting for music and is ideally located in the town centre. We have had a wonderfully fruitful and happy relationship with our hosts there ever since”, Duncan tells us. “Initially we took the old Arts Centre piano to St Mary’s but, in 2007, the Weymouth and Portland Piano Association purchased a new instrument, a Yamaha C6, which is now housed at St Mary’s Church. And we are lucky enough to be able to use the piano for our concerts. People are constantly remarking on the wonderful setting and piano, and how fortunate we are to have such an ideal set-up. It’s warm and welcoming, and I’ve always tried to make the concerts like that, too.”
As well as championing young artists and encouraging unfamiliar repertoire, Duncan has always sought to feature living composers and new music in the series. He has frequently played, recorded and broadcast contemporary piano music at home and abroad, and he has brought a taste of this activity to South Dorset – “in small doses, carefully chosen! I’m mindful that many people can be suspicious of contemporary music per se but, by choosing it with care, programming it with sensitivity and having it eloquently introduced by living, breathing composers at the top of their game, I try to demystify it and engage new enthusiasts. And we’ve had some very distinguished composers visiting us over the years.” At one of the first concerts at St Mary’s 15 years ago John Joubert, the late South African-born composer best known for his choral music and with whose piano music Duncan is closely associated, introduced several of his own works. “That was a unique opportunity for us all to hear a titan of his age talking about what fired his creative passions, what he wanted audiences to listen out for and what he hoped they’d get out of his music.” Other visitors have included Grammy-nominated Dobrinka Tabakova, later to become the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Residence. “At the very first concert, the late Andrew Downes was in the audience to listen to his First Piano Sonata, and Andrew – a close friend of mine for many years Head of Composition at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – visited on many later occasions too.” One of the most memorable and moving verbal additions to the series came in September 2006: “We invited Christopher Finzi, son of the composer Gerald Finzi and a distinguished musician himself, to a concert on the very day marking the 50th anniversary of Finzi’s death. I asked him if he would be willing to say a few words to the audience on that significant occasion, and he responded with the most wonderful, touching reflection on his father’s personality, musing on what Finzi senior would have thought of the modern world had he come back to see how life had changed. That was a special moment, and a little bit of history was made here in Weymouth.”
The complete song cycles of Finzi were programmed as a series in 2006 and, in 2014-15, Duncan was joined by Catrin Win Morgan, violinist in the renowned Brodowski Quartet, to play the complete violin and piano sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms in a series of concerts spanning the whole season. In 2013-14, Duncan and three colleagues formed the Wessex Piano Quartet for a year-long residency, exploring works for this well-loved combination of piano and strings by Faure, Howells and Dvorak and returning in later seasons to play Mozart, Brahms and Taneyev. Duncan formed the Southampton Piano Trio, originally with teaching colleagues at Southampton University, and gave several successful Weymouth recitals. And, in a collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music in 2013, a memorable concert saw Duncan joining forces with four senior students to play Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Every Christmas is marked by a special seasonal concert, often featuring Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols, and one year the actor Freddie Fox – once a pupil of Duncan’s at Bryanston School -contributed Christmas readings and reflections to a specially devised programme entitled ‘A West Country Christmas ‘. The Barn Choir, a team of local singers directed by Richard Hall, were regular Christmas guests for over two decades, from 2004 until their retirement in 2025, and the baritone Timothy Dickinson has become a seasonal favourite in recent years. “In the early years we also presented occasional Saturday morning Coffee Concerts,” Duncan recalls, “and for some years the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department sent us an outstanding young musician each year. Several of these became friends and ended up coming back, sometimes several times and with other friends and colleagues.”
Among many other highlights of the first ten years was a special celebrity concert in January 2006, when oboist George Caird and cellist Jane Salmon joined Duncan for a recital of which the Dorset Echo wrote: “The three played as well as I have heard anywhere, and to a packed house.”
Tragedy struck in 2011 when Angela Nankivell died after a long illness. “She shouldered the weight of the administrative burden, which was considerable, and was a wonderful musician and a good friend. I still miss her, and when she was ill I wondered whether we’d be able to continue”, admits Duncan. Fortunately, his colleague and friend Jean Shannon, formerly General Administrator of the Scottish Baroque Ensemble and other premier professional organisations, came to the rescue and became Concerts Manager for almost a decade. “Jean really saved the series,” Duncan tells me, “and I owe her a huge debt. Jean had organised concerts for decades at the Southbank Centre and other London venues, and she knows her job inside out and at the highest level. I could never have coped with the organisation, but Jean put an immense amount of work in and helped us to build on the structure that Angela had already set in place. We streamlined the planning process to 10 concerts per year – previously we’d had more – and we managed to build up our audiences further. Jean created a website, an electronic mailing list and regular reminder bulletins, and our audiences shot up.”
Jean Shannon retired in the autumn of 2019, but fate once again stepped in to assure a smooth and fortuitous succession. Frances Wilson – a pianist, publicist and writer, celebrated for her popular blog The Cross-Eyed Pianist – had recently relocated to Dorset, and Duncan asked her whether she would like to take over the reins from Jean. “Fortunately, for me, and for all of us,” remarks Duncan, “Frances was able to accept my invitation, and a new chapter in our history began! We both delight in taking the opportunity to welcome friends old and new to South Dorset to make music, and Frances was absolutely the perfect person to step into the role.”
Just as Frances was settling into her new role, the COVID-19 Lockdown brought the concerts to a sudden halt in March 2020. Although the remainder of the planned season had to be abandoned, Duncan began a regular series of online mini-concerts to keep in touch with the lunchtime audiences. He played a piece each day from March until June 2020, and commissioned a series of thirty new piano miniatures from contemporary composers. This enterprise was supported by donations for the Help Musicians Coronavirus Hardship Fund and led to a critically acclaimed CD, “Contemporary Piano Soundbites”. During the autumn and winter of 2020 Frances and Duncan pioneered several socially-distanced lunchtime concerts, repeating a shorter programme to smaller audiences. In June 2021 Duncan gave the 200th concert in the series, a recital of Schubert and Beethoven piano sonatas, and an enthusiastic audience was glad to be back. The concerts resumed from September 2021, with a single cancelled concert in December due to rocketing COVID rates. That September concert was given by distinguished pianist Penelope Roskell, a professor at Trinity Laban Conservatoire who grew up in Weymouth, and played the great Schubert Piano Sonata in B Flat. “It’s a piece I’ve played in the series several times over the years, and it’s one of the most profound masterpieces in the repertoire”, notes Duncan. “My mother, who in earlier days had determinedly walked around Weymouth distributing posters for the concerts, had died the week before, and it was especially moving to listen to someone else play that wonderful work at such a time. That concert underlined the way in which the concert series has always celebrated its home-grown links in national and international contexts. In Penny’s Weymouth childhood our fathers had known one another, and my father had sold hers a boat some 55 years earlier. We compared photographs, and she kindly dedicated her concert to the memory of both my parents. On a wider scale, too, the world felt very different after the pandemic, but Frances and I planned ahead in determined style, and audiences grew and continued to enjoy themselves!”
“By this stage in our history”, Duncan relates, “established performers were telling me that they gave one of their first concerts for us, and what a pivotal experience it was for them. Frequently we have invited them back and our audiences have relished that sense of continuity and association.”
For many years, almost from the outset, the concerts were recorded by Ridgeway Radio for broadcast in Dorset County Hospital, and later more widely on community radio station KeeP 106 FM. This long and happy association brought much pleasure throughout the county and only came to a close with the onset of the 2020 pandemic.
In the summer of 2022 Weymouth celebrated twenty years of lunchtime music and Duncan himself gave the July recital to close the season and mark the occasion. That autumn he was appointed to the staff of the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department, a move that saw a new initiative emerge. Outstanding students and chamber groups were welcomed for a special new ‘Young Musicians Showcase’ series on Sunday afternoons in the summer months, which has also featured Duncan’s students from Southampton University.
The year 2023 struck a melancholy note in the history of music in Weymouth, with the closure of the Weymouth Music Club which had brought professional chamber concerts to Weymouth for more than 75 years. This left the lunchtime series as the only provider of chamber music concerts in the town – “which increased our remit and responsibility”, says Duncan. In acknowledgement of this, and of a generous gift from the Club, the concerts were renamed Chamber Music Weymouth in 2024. Duncan is keen to record the illustrious history of the Music Club, “for whom many leading British and international artists performed over many decades. For their 25th anniversary in 1971, Vladimir Ashkenazy gave a recital at the Pavilion Theatre, and generations of the most eminent young professionals came to Weymouth to play for the Club, alongside famous names such as the oboist Leon Goossens, the Kings Singers and pianists Moura Lympany and Irene Scharrer. The Weymouth Music Club supported me as a young artist and I gave its annual piano recital when I was 21, as many other young players did. I was honoured to be made the Club’s Chairman in its final years, and it is very important to me that we maintain aspects of the Weymouth Music Club’s work and ethos in our own programming for Chamber Music Weymouth. Times change, so do budgets and so do the habits of the music profession, but supporting young artists and bringing chamber music to the people of South Dorset are priorities we share with the old Music Club, as well as moral and spiritual necessities in a civilised society.”
Further responsibility came with the dissolution in 2024 of the Weymouth Music Festival, which had supported amateur music making for 36 years with non-competitive, encouraging and stimulating classes given by distinguished visiting adjudicators. “We can’t replicate the scale of that operation”, notes Duncan, “but we have a few further plans to support young musicians in a way that resonates with the founding principles of the Festival. One is an international piano competition, announced for February 2027, which I hope will further put our stretch of the south coast firmly on the musical map.”
Principally, of course, it as as a provider of monthly lunchtime concerts that Chamber Music Weymouth functions, and Duncan and Frances remain vigorous and imaginative in the service of this aim. “In 2027 we celebrate 25 years of the concert series”, reflects Duncan. “That’s half my lifetime!” 2027 is indeed Duncan’s own fiftieth birthday year, but it is also the Beethoven bicentenary year and marks the centenary of the birth of the composer John Joubert, who came to introduce his own works in the series in 2004. The 2026-27 Chamber Music Weymouth season will feature Beethoven200 and Joubert100 strands, reflecting on the work and legacy of both composers. “I will play a couple of late Beethoven piano sonatas”, says Duncan, “and I’ll be joined by two outstanding young string players – Leora Cohen and Ellen Baumring-Gledhill – for piano trios by Beethoven and Joubert. Some other pianists will be playing Beethoven, too, and we have a couple of treats already in store for early in the 2027-28 season, which will continue the Beethoven strand.” And in 2028 another commemoration of two composer anniversaries is planned. “You might be able to guess at least one of them!”, says Duncan. It gives both Frances and Duncan much pleasure that Chamber Music Weymouth recently received the 2026 Arts Award from the Weymouth Civic Society in recognition of their ‘popular and outstanding lunchtime concerts.’ “We were very honoured and touched by the award,” says Frances “and it makes us feel fully part of the cultural landscape of Weymouth and its surrounds.”
From the earliest days a quarter of a century ago the lunchtime concerts were distinguished by the provision of lunches before the concerts, and Duncan is quick to point out that this has been “as much, if not more, an attraction than the music!” These remain a highlight under the direction of Marilyn Mackenzie and her team. Duncan says that “what I love about these concerts is that there’s a real sense of community. Our Wednesday lunchtimes bring many different types of people together in a shared joy of the music, the people, the place and a very special atmosphere. We’re getting between 70 and 80 people coming to almost every concert, and I’m really proud of that. It shows our audiences are loving the music and appreciating the variety of repertoire and artistic standards we work hard to give them. They give us incredible support, and I’m deeply grateful. For me it’s a luxury as it binds my worlds together: professional music, which has given me my purpose, living and a vibrant community; and the beauty of South Dorset, which has been my home since childhood. Bringing together people and mouth-watering programmes of music in a spirit of creative endeavour and shared enjoyment. What a privilege that is!”
Duncan Honeybourne, August 2026
CHAMBER MUSIC WEYMOUTH 