So glad that concerts are back and we have loved being back on the road! Fresh from a trip to the beautiful Bilbao, we are about to embark on Beethoven Cycles in the USA.These are postponed from 2020 due to Covid, so it is very exciting to finally be packing our bags/scores/shiny shoes to begin this adventure Stateside. We begin in Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem), then onto the University of Northern Iowa, finishing with a complete chronological cycle for Da Camera in Houston, Texas. Woohoo!
We’ll then head to The Netherlands to visit three of our favourite venues there – The Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Van Houtenkerk (Weesp) and Nieuwe Kerk (Haarlem). Amongst other repertoire we’ll be playing 2 works written for us by composer and friend Sally Beamish.
The Summer is busy at festivals such as Schubertiade (Austria), Corbridge (England), East Neuk Festival (Scotland) and more. We’ll also be back in the Wigmore Hall playing Quintets with clarinetist Rob Plane.
Much to look forward to! Recording plans are hatching and we look forward to getting back into the studio sometime soon.
Very much hope to see you somewhere along the road! Come say hello.
Our very best wishes,
Sara, Donald, Simone and Marie. X
On March the 7th our Beethoven Project is coming to an end and we will perform the last concert of our cycle in the Wigmore Hall. Op. 18:6, Op. 59:9 and Beethoven’s last quartet Op. 135 will be on the programme.
We are also preparing for a four week long tour of the US which will take us all over the country, from California in the South West to New York in the North East. We are looking forward to a return visit to the Carnegie Hall where we will be perform Beethoven on the 16th of March.
On the 4th of May we will premiere a completely fresh quartet by immensely talented composer Emily Howard in the Wigmore Hall. Not to be missed!
We have an updated Elias website on the way so watch out for that!
The first CD of our Beethoven cycle is out! It was recorded live in the Wigmore Hall in February 2014. On it you can listen to the Op. 18:4, the Op. 74 “Harp” and the Op. 130 with the “Grosse Fuge”. Five more Beethoven CD:s to follow in the next few years.
We are coming up towards the end of our Beethoven Project that has lasted more than two years. Our first Beethoven CD of the programme including the Op. 18:4, the Op. 74 “Harp” and the Op. 130 with the “Grosse Fuge” is due for release in a few weeks, and we have two more concerts at the Wigmore Hall lined up, the last of which in March. On Saturday the 10th of January we will be playing Op. 18:5, Op. 59:3 and, Beethoven’s own favourite, Op. 131 at our penultimate Beethoven cycle concert in the Wigmore Hall. In March we will be doing a long tour of the US including a return visit to Carnegie Hall. We hope to see you at a concert very soon!
After a wondeful summer break we are returning to our Beethoven Project with two concerts in the Wigmore Hall, both recorded for the Wigmore Live label. On the 9th of October we will be playing Op.18:3, Op.95 and the monumental Op.130 with the new finale, and on the 1st of November we will be performing a marathon programme consisting of Op.18:2, Op.127 and Op.59:1. Welcome!
We are happy to announce that we have been shortlisted for this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society Award in the category Chamber Music and Song! See more here.
We have just come back from a three-week tour of the US. We played in Washington, Philadelphia and many other wonderful places. We even got as far south as Florida! You can read some of the reviews here, here and here.
On the 19th of May we return to the Wigmore Hall for our second concert in our complete Beethoven quartet series. On the programme is Op. 18:1, the viola quintet Op. 29 (with the eminent Malin Broman) and Op. 132. Do come along if you can!
Our Wigmore Beethoven cycle is about to start. We will over one year and a half play all of Beethoven’s quartet in Wigmore Hall, and all the concerts will be recorded live for the Wigmore Live label. The first concert is on the 20th of February and we will be playing the audience favourite op. 18:4, the uplifting op. 74 “The Harp” and op. 130 with the monumental “Grosse Fuge”. Do come along!
We are back from a fantastic tour of Australia. We played in some of the most incredible halls, and met many wonderful people including the lovely staff of Musica Viva.
We’re now back in Beethoven mode, and preparing for the first concert series of our new Glasgow residency. Other plans for the autumn include our 4th programme in our Beethoven cycle, a tour of Sweden and concerts in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.
See you at a concert very soon!
We are just about to embark on a tour of Australia. On it we will play pieces by Beethoven and Haydn, and also a completely fresh and exciting piece by Australian composer Matthew Hindson. See our schedule for details.
We had the great pleasure of going to Australia a few years ago, and we are looking forward tremendously to going back and seeing again all the wonderful people we got to know then. The tour is organised by the incredible Musica Viva organisation.
We have just come back from the US, and we are just about to sink our teeth in some new Beethoven quartets.
The tour was fascinating and challenging. We played concerts all over the states, from California in the west, to Maine in the east, including two concerts in Carnegie Hall. We will be playing some of the programme at the Wigmore Hall on the 14th of May. Do come along if you are around in London!
We will also be celebrating the Borletti Buitoni Trust in the Queen Elisabeth Hall on the 17th of May, with a performance of Mozart’s clarinet quintet together with Swedish clarinetist Martin Fröst.
Having almost finished our second Beethoven programme, we are now preparing for a month long tour of the United States.
The second programme consists of the Op. 18:3, the Op. 95 and the Op. 130. We still show no signs of growing tired of Beethoven’s music (how could you?).
The US tour will take us from San Fransisco in the west to New York in the east, and we will be returning to Carnegie Hall for two concerts. In several of the concerts we will be collaborating with pianist Jonathan Biss on his Schumann Project.
We are at the moment in the middle of the concerts making up the first programme in our Beethoven cycle, that will stretch over the next years. This programme consists of the Op.18:5, Op.59:3 and Op.131 quartets. When playing these pieces one is certainly happy to be playing in a string quartet.
We have received good reviews for our latest CD:s; both our latest Wigmore Live CD and our piano quintet CD were labelled ‘Critic’s Choice’ in the last issues of Gramophone Magazine.
Listen to ‘In Tune’ on BBC3 on the 5th of December! We will be playing Beethoven and talking about our cycle.
On the 13th of December we will be playing an exciting all Elgar programme at the Jaqueline du Pré music building in Oxford together with pianist Dan Tong.
See you at a concert soon!
We had the great pleasure to record the piano quintets by Schumann and Dvorak a few months ago together with the extraordinary pianist and musician Jonathan Biss, and the result can now be heard on CD!
We have just played our last concert for the summer, and we will now take a few months off before coming back with renewed strength this autumn. We are all dispersing to different countries and projects (Africa, India, Sweden…), recharging our musical batteries. In November our Beethoven project starts for real, and we can’t wait. See you soon!
On our latest CD, hot off the press, we are performing a new piece, “In My Craft or Sullen Art”, by the exciting young composer Huw Watkins, together with the extraordinary tenor Mark Padmore. Other artists on the CD include Alina Ibragimova, Paul Watkins and the Nash Ensemble.
Watch a video from the recording of the Bach CD with Xuefei Yang by clicking here!
Our new CD has just been released. On it we play Haydn’s Op. 64:6 quartet together with Schumann’s first quartet. The programme is rounded off with an encore composed by Donald. The concert was recorded live at the Wigmore Hall.
We have just returned from a wonderfully intense tour of Canada and USA. We played in Vancouver, Middlebury, Philadelphia, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and we made our debuts at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and Carnegie Hall in New York. We were met with fantastic hospitality by organisers and audience.
Our next Wigmore Hall programme will include Haydn’s famous 54:2 quartet and Sibelius’ “Voces Intimae”. The latter is not very often heard in the UK, although it is one of the most important quartet works of the 20th century. Composed the same year as Bartok’s first quartet, it looks, in certain aspects, forward to a style that would characterise this composer’s later style. We will finish off with Dvorak’s exuberant piano quintet with the extraordinary American pianist Jonathan Biss. Welcome on the 1st of March!
We have just released a new CD where we are playing together with the wonderful guitarist Xuefei Yang. The repertoire is Bach concertos, transcribed especially for the guitar by Xuefei!
We will have the great honour to play the Brahms Piano Quintet with one of the foremost pianists of our time, Leon Fleischer, in two upcoming concerts: the first in Basingstoke and the second in Wigmore Hall. The Wigmore Hall concert will be broadcast live on BBC 3.
Leon Fleischer studied with Artur Schnabel, and is thus part of a piano tradition handed down from Beethoven himself. Do come along to this rare opportunity to hear a truly legendary musician.
The Basingstoke concert is on the 28th of January and the Wigmore concert on the 30th.
Also on the programme is Webern’s wonderfully romantic “Langsamer Satz”, and in Basingstoke, Beethoven’s Op. 18:6 quartet.
Our next Wigmore concert on the 16th of December will explore fugues, and will include Beethoven’s monumental Op. 130 quartet with the Grosse Fuge. We will also perform Haydn’s extraordinary Op.20:2 quartet in C major (the last movement of which is a fugue, quite different to Beethoven’s!) and some fugues from Bach’s “Art of the Fugue”. Come along and enjoy some different aspects of this musical form.
Read here about our process of learning the Op. 130 quartet.
Welcome to our next concert in the Wigmore Hall. It takes place on Sunday the 18th of September at 11.30. We will be playing Janacek’s “Kreutzer Sonata” and Beethoven’s wonderful Op. 135 quartet. See you there!
We would like to welcome you to our Chamber Music Prom concert that takes place at 1pm on Monday the 25th of July in Cadogan Hall, London. We will be playing Purcell Fantasias, “Reed Stanzas”, a completely fresh quartet by Sally Beamish, and Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the eminent clarinetist Julian Bliss. If you can’t be present, listen to the concert on the radio!
The Beethoven Project continues and we have received a wonderful response to it during the first month the website has been online. Please visit the website here and leave a comment or contribute to the “Your Beethoven” section.
We have a new video on YouTube with us playing the first movement of Mendelssohn’s quartet Op. 80.
We can also happily announce our new collaboration with the eminent American agency David Rowe Artists. Visit the website here.
Elias live at Montpellier Radio France festival. Mendelssohn Op. 80, first movement.
We are now happy to reveal our aforementioned secret project: We have just launched a new website that will document the process of us learning the complete quartets of Beethoven over a number of years!
“We are incredibly excited to have launched this website which will enable you to follow and be part of our journey through the complete Beethoven String Quartets. We look forward to regularly updating and building the content to share with you in the coming years…It has long been our dream to perform the complete Beethoven String Quartets as a cycle and we feel that it is finally the right time to begin…We will present the cycle in various formats in venues across the country over the next 4 years. We hope this gives us enough time and space to immerse ourselves in the music and present the programmes to as wide an audience as possible. It also enables us to develop this website both as a personal account of our experiences and as a broader educational resource.” Donald writes on the new website.
Please visit:
Enjoy!
We are looking forward to a busy month of March, when we will play with the marvelous clarinettist Michael Collins for the first time, go to Hong Kong and spend two weeks in Aldeburgh to play concerts and have coaching sessions with the legendary violinist Hugh Maguire!
We are featured on this month’s BBC Music Magazine cover disc. We are playing Haydn’s extraordinary op.64:6 quartet, Schubert’s Quartettsatz and Mendelssohn’s viola quintet in B flat major op.87 with Malin Broman.
Please come along to our concert in the Wigmore Hall on January the 10th, or tune in on your radios, to hear us play an all Mozart program (“Dissonance” and the G-minor Quintet) together with the fabulous Malin Broman.
Our recent Britten CD was recently chosen as one of the “Pick of the year 2010” CDs in the BBC CD Review Annual Critics’ Round-up!
2010 draws to a close… It has been a wonderfully hectic year, filled with exciting concerts and recordings. 2011 will be our last year on the BBC NGA scheme, which has proven a wonderful opportunity to meet and work with some tremendous artists, and to be heard on the radio of course! Our website is due to be redesigned, and we will release two new CDs; a Wigmore Live disc with our recent Wigmore concert, and another one with Mendelssohn quartets. We will also return to the recording studio during next year. But the most exciting upcoming event will be the launch of our new, still secret project that will extend for a number of years, featuring its own website… Please stand by for further details!
After an intense summer with exciting concerts at festivals in England, Scotland, France, Sweden and the Netherlands (including our Concertgebouw debut), we are now ready for the autumn, which begins with a concert at the Wigmore Hall. We are performing Haydn’s quartet op 64:5 and Schumann’s first quartet. The concert will be recorded for Wigmore Live. Welcome!
Donald (our second violinist) has just published a blog on the Borletti-Buitoni website, describing the last few months of the quartet.
Read it here.
We have received good reviews for our new Britten CD:
Editor´s choice in Gramophone
Editor’s choice in Classic FM Magazine
The Strad recommends in The Strad
CD Review Disc of the week in BBC 3 CD Review (May 2010)
**** in BBC Music Magazine
**** in The Sunday Times
We have put some quotes from the reviews on the “reviews” page on our website.
We can proudly reveal that we were selected “Newcomer of the year 2010” by the BBC Music Magazine. Read more here, and watch the award ceremony from Kings Place, London, here.
Watch the recently published promotional material from the BBC 3 New Generation Artist scheme here and here.
We have just released our latest CD with quartets by Benjamin Britten (No 2, 3 and the Divertimenti). We will post clips from some of the movements on this website as soon as possible!
Read more here
We can proudly report that we are the recipients of one of the Borletti-Buitoni Awards of 2010. The Borletti-Buitoni trust supports young artists in developing international careers. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the BBT trust!
Read more here.
The Elias String Quartet was listed as one of the five “leading young string quartets” in the recent issue of Gramophone, together with the Pavel Haas Quartet, the Doric Quartet, the Jerusalem Quartet and Quatour Ebène. We are also featured on the cover CD, playing a movement from Mendelssohn’s op.80 quartet.
If you want regular updates from us about upcoming concerts and other news, please send an email to:
contact@eliasstringquartet.com
We will add you to the mailing list and stay in touch.
(If you want to contact us about a possible concert, please contact Ingpen & Williams at:
We happily acknowledge that our recording of the op.80 Mendelssohn Quartet was chosen as best recording in a recent BBC Radio 3 Building A Library!
We can proudly report that we have been selected to join BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme!
The BBC writes on their web page:
“More than 70 international soloists and groups have been supported by the scheme since its inception 10 years ago, since which time it has provided some of the world’s best young musical talent with a wide-ranging programme of broadcast and performance opportunities over a two-year period.
Those artists joining the scheme from September are:
Khatia Buniatishvilli (piano – Georgia)
Francesco Piemontesi (piano – Italy)
Elias Quartet (UK)
Atos Trio (Germany)
Malin Christensson (soprano – Sweden)
Henk Neven (baritone – The Netherlands)”
After a fantastic tour, and an amazing week in Armidale coaching young australian chamber musicians, we have returned to Britain. We played concerts in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Newcastle, Coffs Harbour and Hobart, in some truly spectacular venues. The schedule was intense, but the experience was incredibly rewarding thanks to the well-oiled organisation of Musica Viva, and the remarkable people working there.
In Armidale we met some young aspiring groups, many of which can look forward to a long professional career. They astounded us with their dedication and receptive attitude! We certainly learned at least as much as they did!
We will miss Australia and the incredible people we met there profoundly.
Our new CD has just been released. It was recorded live in the Wigmore Hall on the 29th of December last year in a concert where we performed Schubert´s Quartettsatz, Mozart´s “Dissonance” Quartet, and Mendelssohn´s extraordinary Quartet Op.44 No.2. It has already received fine reviews!
After four amazing years we have decided to leave Ensemble 360 to be able to concentrate fully on the quartet. Through the arrangements of Music in the Round, we have been fortunate to be able to make music together with some of the finest young players in the world, and get to know an incredibly supportive audience.
We will staying for the full 2008-2009 season, and we hope to be able to come back to Sheffield often!
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Our disc of Alexander Goehr’s piano quintet has just been released for Meridian Records, with pianist Daniel Becker.
It’s a wonderful work which deserves to be better known and become part of the standard piano quintet repertoire! We’ve loved getting to know it and working on it with Mr. Goehr. Having him there during the recording could have been very stressful, whereas on the contrary, it was reassuring as he was such an encouraging presence and left us enormous scope for freedom in our interpretation of his music. We played the quintet last November at Mr. Goehr’s 75th birthday celebration concert in the Wigmore Hall. Also on the disc are his piano trio and his suite for violin and piano, with violinist Ning Kam and cellist Thomas Caroll.