Biography

Anna Katharina Wildermuth, violin
Noémi Zipperling, violin
Caspar Vinzens, viola
Lukas Sieber, cello

The Aris Quartett was founded in Frankfurt in 2009 and has retained, fifteen years later, all its original members. The succinct, four-letter name derives from the last letters of the musicians’ first names: annA katharina Wildermuth, noémI Zipperling, caspaR Vinzens, lukaS Sieber. The Quartet has won innumerable prizes for young ensembles, including ECHO Rising Stars by the European Concert Hall Organization and no fewer than five awards at the ARD International Music Competition in Munich. Much of the musicians’ training as a quartet took place under the tutelage of Günter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartet. The Quartet’s discography includes half a dozen releases on the Genuin label (Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Reger, Zemlinsky, etc.) plus its most recent, on Deutsche Grammophon, of music by brother and sister Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. The Aris Quartett places special focus on contemporary music and has given the world premieres of works by such composers as Lukas Ligeti, Gerald Resch, Misato Mochizuki, and Pierre Dominique Ponnelle. The ensemble also devotes itself to cross-genre projects, including with the jazz pianist Omer Klein.
First LMMC appearance.

www.Aris Quartett

Notes

Whenever the name “Mendelssohn” appears on concert programs it is almost always Felix who is played. But Felix had an older sibling who was equally talented, precocious, and ambitious. That was Fanny, who married Wilhelm Hensel at the age of 23. Her catalogue runs to over four hundred works, but she wrote just one string quartet, in 1834, one of the first ever written by a woman. It waited until 1988 to be published.

In both quality and quantity, the fifteen string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich stand as the only comparable body of such works written in the twentieth century that can be ranked with Beethoven’s. No. 8 was composed in 1960 while the composer was in Dresden working on music for a film. The film’s subject matter (the story of Fascism) must surely have reminded the composer of his own harrowing wartime experiences during the siege of Leningrad. Shostakovich incorporated themes from a number of his earlier works that in retrospect had become landmarks in his development as a composer. The Eighth Quartet has become the most frequently performed of all Shostakovich’s string quartets by a large margin.

It is always dangerous to try to conjoin the facts of an artist’s outer, biographical circumstances with his creative output, but in the case of Schubert’s A-minor quartet the associations are unavoidable; in fact, they are central to its conception. The mood of tragedy, depression and grief that hangs over this work is surely a reflection of Schubert’s dismal life at the time of composition (1824). Schubert had just spent a long period in hospital, being treated for the venereal disease (probably syphilis) that would kill him less than five years later, and both his physical and mental health were in fragile condition.  The quartet takes its nickname from the main theme of the second movement. This gentle, pastoral theme forms the substance of the Entr’acte Music after Act III, written a few months earlier as part of the incidental music Schubert provided for Helmina von Chézy’s play Rosamunde. (The theme also turns up three years later, in varied form, as the third of the four impromptus Op. 142 (D. 935)). This is the only movement in the quartet that offers relief from the prevailing mood of despondency
and despair.

Robert Markow