String Quartets in the Diamond: Quatuor Ébène – Beethoven's String Quartets (3:6)
Hear Beethoven’s 16 string quartets across six concerts in the Queen’s Hall as the French star quartet Quatuor Ébène returns to The Black Diamond. This evening’s programme features Nos. 7 and 3.
What do Beethoven's string quartets sound like 200 years after the composer's death?
In 2020, to mark Beethoven’s 250th birthday, Quatuor Ébène released all 16 of Beethoven's string quartets. The recordings were made all over the world, from Nairobi to Melbourne, and they received great praise for their contemporary interpretation.
Quatuor Ébène itself describes Beethoven's music as "music that expresses itself freely and that addresses the audience of the future rather than its own time."
Beethoven's 16 string quartets have taken pride of place in the chamber music repertoire, and they show his creative development as a composer. From the earliest Viennese Classical string quartets written in the wake of the genre's earlier masters, Haydn and Mozart, through the "middle period" when Beethoven broke with tradition and made the genre his own, and to his late string quartets written in the years leading up to his death, which have been called some of the most sublime music ever written.
String Quartet No. 1, No. 9 and No. 10
This evening, the String Quartet No. 1 from Opus 18 will be performed, Beethoven's first collection of string quartets (Nos. 1–6), which were composed between 1798 and 1800 during Beethoven’s early period, characterised by the Viennese Classical style. The collection is dedicated to Prince Franz Joseph Maximilian von Lobkowitz, who was known for his interest in music and later became Beethoven’s patron.
With Opus 18, Beethoven joined the ranks of great composers who had mastered the classical Viennese string quartet. As a pioneer, Haydn had first established the genre in 1771, then Mozart followed – and then came Beethoven. When Beethoven was working on his first string quartets in 1799, Haydn was completing his last two. In these first quartets, Beethoven showed that he not only spoke the same musical language as Haydn and Mozart, but also that his own personality and creativity were already shining through.
In the subsequent middle period, Beethoven truly made the genre his own. String Quartets No. 9 and No. 10 are from this period, also called his “heroic” period, which is characterised by a more dramatic, expressive and romantic style.
String Quartet No. 10 is a large, rich and grand work with a strong vitality that fully lives up to the description of the period as “heroic”. String Quartet No. 9 is the third and last of the so-called Razumovsky Quartets, commissioned by the Russian ambassador Count Razumovsky in 1805.
The three string quartets represented a serious break with tradition, and with them Beethoven truly made the string quartet his own genre. All three string quartets contain distinct Russian themes, as Razumovsky wished.
The performers
Quatuor Ébène:
Pierre Colombet, violin
Gabriel Le Magadure, violin
Marie Chilemme, viola
Yuya Okamoto, cello
Quatuor Ébène was formed in 1999 at the conservatoire in Boulogne-Billancourt in France. Since then, the quartet has performed at internationally renowned venues such as Wigmore Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York. Their performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets have also been heard at Philharmonie de Paris and Alte Oper in Frankfurt.
The quartet itself describes the string quartet as the musical form of democracy, in which each musician steps forward with their own voice while the whole emerges through shared interplay, attentiveness and mutual understanding.
