Page 269 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

We talk about the special moments of our travels together over the last 30 years, and hear
ourselves talk about the clear air and breathtaking views that made us forget everything when we
climbed the mountains of Petra in Jordan on a day off, or how funny the babble of languages was
at the American Academy in Rome, where the Italian cheerfulness was as infectious as the
passion to savour the day with music and conversation until the last minute.

But shouldn't we actually be clarifying what our recipe for success is instead of reminiscing?
There are nods of agreement and concentrated expressions. "We've always focused more on the
music than on ourselves and have never stopped searching. We couldn't help it," is the first
suggestion from the bass section. Immediately comes the dry reply from the second violin: "Well,
if you don't have any concerts, then it doesn't help to lose yourself completely in the music.
Without the competition prizes, the important debuts and regular appearances at major stages
from Tokyo to London to New York, without highlights such as the concerts at the Spanish court
or musical challenges such as Beethoven to Trojahn cycles, things would have been very
different for us."

Our silence afterwards is as eloquent as the conversations we have when we know each other's
thoughts. Of course our path would have been different, but we would still have followed it.
Perhaps the work would have been less international, a little quieter and more regional. Who
knows? Nowadays, we call a regional presence sustainable and report on it with pride. Back
then, 30 years ago, we thought that a full-time string quartet could only succeed at an
international level. No distance was too far for us, no journey too arduous. Curious and hungry
for new encounters and horizons, we spent much more time travelling than we did at home with
our families.

We have to postpone the conversation because our train is leaving shortly. In just three hours,
we’re expected in Coburg for a rehearsal. There we will see many long-time companions again,
friends we are very much looking forward to meeting.

The programme once again features Bartók, as the Musikfreunde Coburg have embedded the
six Bartók quartets in six exciting programmes. Even today, our interpretations of Bartók and
Schoenberg are characterised by the extraordinary encounters we had as a very young
ensemble at the Tanglewood Festival in the United States. We received coaching there from
Louis Krasner, who gave the first performance of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, and from Eugene
Lehner of the Kolisch Quartet, the ensemble that had rehearsed quartet works by Bartók, Berg,
Schoenberg and Webern with the composers themselves before they gave the premieres. We
learnt at first hand how the great composers and musical visionaries had imagined their own
works.

We were particularly impressed by the work they did with us on Bartók's Fifth String Quartet, a
composition full of power, indeed sometimes almost brute force, as we as a young ensemble
thought we detected in the musical text. But we were proved wrong. Again and again, the two
musical legends asked us, for example, to clearly phrase a series of hard rhythmic beats
from ff to fff, and also to play more in the upper half of the bow in order to achieve a softer yet
precise sound – just as Bartók had once demanded of the Kolisch Quartet. When we play Bartók
today or teach students, it is above all this great contrast between the modern understanding of
extreme dynamics and our knowledge of the demands for the finest nuances made by the
composer himself that we highlight and
demand.