Quatuor Ébène

Quatuor Ébène performs four concerts during its residency at the 2022 Beethovenfest – an interim report.

It is simply a great honour to have a residency in Bonn, after we committed ourselves to a Beethoven cycle [Beethoven Around the World, 2020]. The team of Beethovenfest and the audience have been incredibly kind and open and quite enthusiastic!

Under the condition of playing a dense programme to a high standard in a relatively short time period, we sought to balance out our pure quartet repertoire with pieces that would allow us to play with others: our dear colleague, cellist Nicolas Altstaedt, or two students of ours from Munich university of music. The repertoire ranges from Haydn to Janáček and Shostakovich over Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, Strauss and Tchaikovski. Unfortunately we couldn't play with clarinetist Martin Fröst, we wish him a quick recovery.

Most of the time we travel quite long hours, because we fly as little as possible. It happens that we spend eight hours on the train, even on the day of the concert. Then, the balance between tiredness and quality is very hard to find. But we always try to have three good hours of rehearsal on stage.

Spontaneity is not very difficult to achive: it would be much more exhausting to fix everything and to try to deliver an exakt copy of an interpretation again and again. We draw inspiration from the relationship between ourselves - our playing together is always flexible and this interactive rapport is the most beautiful thing in the world, despite interpersonal problems that sometimes arise!

An ensemble that can make a moment special, even for a few minutes, to create meaning with sound. Meaningful music is rare to find. Beautiful sound and technique is quite abundant among the string quartet scene, but what makes a quartet memorable is more an ability for theatric performance.