Biography

Florian Schötz  -  violin
Pinchas Adt  -  violin
Christopher Vandory  -  viola
Raphael Paratore  -  cello

The Goldmund Quartett is widely regarded as one of the most exciting string quartets of the younger generation, renowned for its beautiful sound, fine intonation, and homogeneity of musical approach. The Goldmund Quartett perfected its artistry in studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, and with members of the Alban Berg, Hagen, Borodin, Belcea, Ysaÿe, and Cherubini Quartets. Among the high-profile competitions at which the Goldmund has won prizes are the 2018 International Wigmore Hall String Competition, the 2018 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, and the ARD Munich Competition. In recent years the quartet has given debut recitals at the Philharmonie in Paris, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Konzerthaus in Vienna. The Quartett’s discography includes standard repertory by Haydn, Schubert and Shostakovich, but also off-the-beaten-track material under the rubrics of Prisma and Travel Diaries. The musicians perform on the so-called “Paganini Quartet,” four instruments once owned by the legendary Niccolò Paganini. The Goldmund is the first German quartet to have the honour of using these priceless instruments, on loan from Japan’s Nippon Music Foundation. 2nd LMMC concert.
 

https://www.goldmundquartet.com/

Notes

No composer contributed more to the development of the string quartet than Haydn. His eighty-some works in this genre stand, both in quantity and quality, as a monument in the history of music. Had Haydn never written a symphony, a mass or an opera, he would still command a prominent place in the history books for his contribution to the string quartet, which he brought from its infancy in the mid-eighteenth century to full maturity by the 1790s.

The quartet we hear today is the very last Haydn completed, and was published in the same year (1801) by the same publisher (Artaria, Vienna) as had published Beethoven’s six Op. 18 quartets just three months earlier. Why Haydn’s Op. 77 set contains just two quartets rather than the usual six is often attributed to the older composer’s realization that, as musicologist James Keller writes, “the ground rules [for writing string quartets] had changed,” and Haydn knew it. “His Op. 77 Quartets,” continues Keller, “display all the imagination and polish one would expect from Haydn at that advanced point in his career, but certain traits seem to reflect the new experiments of Beethoven more than the ongoing logic of Haydn’s own stream of quartets: sudden dynamic explosions, vigor in the minuets that seem to be turbulent Beethoven-style scherzos in all but name.” To these qualities one might add an inherent robust character and the transferal of the weightiest movement from the first to the finale. Thus, the Goldmund Quartett’s choice to program Haydn’s last quartet followed by Beethoven’s first is both fortuitous and instructive.

While Haydn and Beethoven contributed numerous magnificent examples to the genre of the string quartet, Grieg produced just one, in 1878. Fortunately, it is a good one, a work of broad dimensions, unusual variants of traditional forms, orchestral sonorities, and a vigor not often found in chamber music. “Not intended to deal in trivialities for petty minds,” was how Grieg described it. One suspects that both Haydn and especially Beethoven would have echoed that sentiment.

Robert Markow