Very excited that we will soon begin our new Schumann Series 2018/19 at the Wigmore Hall. Three concerts exploring the music of Schumann, including the 3 String Quartets alongside specially chosen repertoire including 2 new commissions. More news on that soon…. but please do come to the first concert on the 28th Sept where we will be playing, amongst other things, the Piano Quintet with pianist Jonathan Biss.
https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/artistic-series/schumann-string-quartet-series
Delighted that our Schumann disc has been released! Here is what Gramophone Magazine had to say…
“I could go on enumerating the myriad glories of these performances, but you get the idea… the Elias’s has instantly become my favourite, and I can’t recommend it urgently enough.”
For full review – https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/schumann-string-quartets-nos-2-3-elias-quartet
We have just returned from the Leeds International Piano Competition where we playing Quintets with the semi-finalists. We had a brilliant (and extremely busy!) time and huge Congratulations to all the pianists involved. It was such a pleasure, and special Congratulations to Eric Lu who went on to win the competition.
Listen to our Dvorak Quintet and other highlights here –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000c4g
Or watch it on – https://www.medici.tv/en/
Hope to see you soon! More Concert dates, new website and news coming very sooooooon……..
Happy New Year to all!
We will soon be rehearsing and preparing for our first concert of the year – “Melodists” at the Wigmore Hall, London on the 12th January. It is the second in our “After Beethoven” series and combines Schubert’s “Quartetsatz”, “Death and the Maiden” and Dvorak’s Opus 51.
The latest double disc in our “Wigmore Live” Beethoven Cycle has been released. This is Volume 4 and contains Op.18,2, Opus 127 and Opus 59,1. Delighted that it has so far been chosen as Disc of the Week on Radio 3’s “Record Review” and received 5 stars in The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/dec/07/beethoven-quartets-vol-4-cd-review-elias-string-quartets-wigmore-hall-live
Check it out and buy from here –
https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/wigmore-hall-live/elias-string-quartet-cd0089
The upcoming months see us playing here in the UK aswell as Portugal, the USA, Canada, Sweden,France and Austria. We will very soon be releasing a new record that is not Beethoven! Will keep you posted…
Thank you all for your support in 2017 and we look forward to seeing you somewhere along the road in 2018! Do come and say hello.
All best wishes,
The Elias Quartet
On the 31st October we will begin our 4 concert series “After Beethoven” at the Wigmore Hall in London.
The idea came to us as we were coming to the end of our Beethoven project. It had been an extraordinary and profoundly changing experience. We were wondering what it must have been like, back then, for audiences to discover Beethoven’s quartets, and in what ways the music world was changed by them. Composers writing string quartets now had Beethoven’s monumental legacy to live up to, not only in terms of the quality of the music but also of the unbelievable development which it encompassed. This would remain intimidating for many of them, and all would be influenced by it in one way or another.
The question of how to follow on from Beethoven was addressed in radically different ways by composers, each coming up with their own solutions by turning to sometimes opposite means of expression. So we’ve arranged each of our programmes around a group of composers (not necessarily all from the same era or part of the world) that seem to us to embrace similar ways of dealing with this challenge Beethoven’s footsteps by developing and expanding his musical language, pushing its boundaries further and in different directions.
Our first concert “In Beethoven’s Footsteps” includes Webern “Langsamer Satz”, Bartok 4 and Brahms Op51,2.
Hope to see you there!