News

Hello all, it has been too long!

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

Schumann and more

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

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

Wigmore “After Beethoven” series begins soon

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!

New Season

We had a fantastic Summer Season and particularly enjoyed trips to the Penarth Festival, Paxton House and Ryedale Festival here in the UK, alongside trips to the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and The Larzac Festival in the South of France.

Our New Season kicked off with a BBC Prom, playing Schubert’s Quintet with our old friend and colleague Alice Neary. Click here to listen back http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b093p39t.

Last night we performed a concert with the Navarra Quartet and we look forward to many more collaborations with them over the coming year.

We will soon be releasing the next discs from our live recordings of our Beethoven cycle… will get back to you on that soon.

Here is an audience view picture from The Concertgebouw.

Our third Beethoven CD is released

The third CD of our complete Beethoven quartet cycle is out. This installment includes Op. 18:3, Op. 95 ‘Serioso’ and Op. 130, this time with the new finale. You can read a review from the Gramophone Magazine here, and in a recent article the first CD of the set was included as one of the top ten recent Beethoven recordings. Read more here.

New Beethoven CD available

The second CD in our complete Beethoven series is out. Included are Op. 18:1, Op. 132 and the string quintet Op. 29 with Malin Broman on viola. You won’t have to wait long for the third installment: it will be out in December.

Summer holidays

We are off for Summer holidays! Next season tours to Italy, USA and Australia awaits.

Make sure to follow us on Facebook for exciting news! Click here.

New management

We are happy to announce that we from now on will be represented in France by Sartory Artists, and in Italy by Leonardo Finotti. We are very excited to add these new friends of ours to team Elias! Do visit their websites at:

www.sartoryartists.com

and

www.leonardofinotti.it

Autumn news

We have just come back from Paris were we played in a celebratory concert (at 1am in the middle of the night) for the extraordinary organisation ProQuartet, that supports young quartets all around the world. We have benefited hugely from this wonderful group of people, and throughout the years received lessons from teachers like György Kurtág and Rainer Schmidt.

Next on our schedule is another tour of the US, with concerts in Houston, Philadelphia and Indianapolis among other places, and concerts in Edinburgh and Sweden. We will finish before Christmas with recording Schumann’s quartets!

Below is a video from the last concert of our Beethoven cycle at the Wigmore Hall.