Violin
Violin
Viola
Violoncello
One of the special qualities of the Quatuor Diotima, according to its longtime violist Franck Chevalier, is to approach the music of the present with a historical perspective: “Awareness of the musical avant-garde means to be aware of its past.” Returning to the Pierre Boulez Saal in a new lineup, the ensemble pairs two “classics” of the avant-garde—Ligeti’s electrifying First Quartet of 1953 and Lachenmann’s Grido, written in 2001—with Brahms’s forward-looking A-minor Quartet.
This is a programmatic vision shared by the Pierre Boulez Saal and the Quatuor Diotima. The four musicians are champions of contemporary music, having collaborated with some of the leading composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Pierre Boulez. At the same time, their programs often combine music of the avant-garde with masterpieces by Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Ravel, and many others. Heard and performed with Quatuor Diotima’s present-day sensitivity, the innovative power of these works becomes all the more striking, inviting us to recalibrate our listening perspective.
With the works heard in this program, each of the three composers responded to something that had come before them. They looked back to predecessors such as Beethoven or Bartók, to the centuries-long tradition of writing for string quartet, or to their own earlier works, while also aiming to transcend the past. And all three found incredibly innovative answers to what it meant to compose a new string quartet at a particular moment in music history: Brahms in 1873, Ligeti in 1953, and Lachenmann in 2001. Listening to these re-inventions of the genre separated roughly by half a century, we can begin to understand how the string quartet has remained one of music’s most alive endeavors.
Each season, we celebrate the genre’s diverse and continuous evolution by inviting leading ensembles to present a diverse range of compositions—from repertoire classics to new experimental works, performed on gut strings or joined by other instruments. And we’re proud to present these concerts in a hall that could not be better suited to experience the intimate interplay of four musicians up close. Find out more about our quartet series here.
