String Quartets in the Diamond: Quatuor Ébène – Beethoven's String Quartets (6:6)
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. 6 and No. 15
The concert opens with String Quartet No. 6 from Opus 18, which was Beethoven's first collection of string quartets (nos. 1–6). The works were composed between 1798 and 1800 during Beethoven's early period, which is written in 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.
String Quartet No. 6 is the last string quartet from this collection, and it is called "La Malinconia" after the work's fourth movement of the same name. The title refers to the movement’s melancholy and heartfelt character, and Beethoven himself noted that it should be played "with the greatest possible delicacy".
String Quartet No. 15 is one of Beethoven's later string quartets, which are more ambitious, experimental and structurally and harmonically complex. The two String Quartets are now considered some of the most "sublime" music ever written, and far ahead of their time.
Despite this, they were written during a period when Beethoven had been through a series of personal tragedies. He suffered from both health and financial problems and by 1816 had become completely deaf, which isolated him. In November 1822, Beethoven received a letter from a young Russian prince, Galitzin, asking him to write a series of new string quartets. String Quartet No. 15 is the last of the three string quartets commissioned by Prince Galitzin.
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.
