In his six Op. 18 quartets, Beethoven staked his claim to the title of Haydn’s and Mozart’s successor in the rarefied realm of the string quartet. Indeed, the G-Major Quartet all but challenges Haydn on his own turf, with its mixture of Classical formality and rambunctious high spirits. It may have been this blithe disregard of convention that led a contemporary critic to describe the Op. 18 quartets as “very difficult to perform and not at all popular”—a judgment that posterity has overturned.
Composed in the summer of 1927, the third of Bartók’s six quartets was influenced by the imaginatively colored sound world of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, which the Hungarian had heard in Vienna earlier that year. What Theodor Adorno called the quartet’s “iron concentration” and “wholly original tectonics” are reflected in its highly compressed form.
Originally conceived as a string quintet and later adapted for two pianos, Brahms’s masterpiece represents a near-perfect marriage of keyboard and strings. Only after Clara Schumann observed that the music was “so full of ideas” that a full orchestra was needed to do it justice did Brahms recast it as a piano quintet. In this form, musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey wrote, “the rhythmic incisiveness of the piano is happily combined with the singing powers of the bowed instruments.”
The unprecedented three-decade career of the Hagen Quartet began in 1981. Its early years,
marked by a series of prizes in chamber music competitions and an exclusive recording
contract with Deutsche Grammophon that produced nearly 45 CDs, enabled the group to work
its way through the virtually unlimited quartet repertoire from which its distinctive
profile has emerged. Collaborations with artistic personalities such as Nikolaus
Harnoncourt and György Kurtág are as important to the Hagen Quartet as its concert
appearances with performers such as Maurizio Pollini, Mitsuko Uchida, Sabine Meyer,
Krystian Zimerman, Heinrich Schiff, and Jörg Widmann. This season, the quartet highlights
Haydn's Op. 76 quartets, and performs at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Tokyo's Toppan Hall,
Vienna's Konzerthaus, Florence's Teatro della Pergola, and the opening of the Pierre Boulez
Saal in Berlin. The quartet also gives the long-awaited premiere of Jörg Widmann's Clarinet
Quintet in Madrid and performs with the Kölner Philharmonie.
In 2011, the Hagen Quartet celebrated its 30th anniversary with two recordings released on
Myrios Classics of works by Mozart, Webern, Beethoven, and Grieg, as well as the Brahms
Clarinet Quintet with Jörg Widmann.The quartet received the prestigious ECHO Klassik award for Ensemble of the
Year in 2011; in 2012, the quartet was named an honorary member of Vienna's Konzerthaus.
The Hagen Quartet'srecent recording of Mozart's string
quartets K. 387 and K. 458 was recognized with a Diapason d'Or, Choc de
Classica, andECHOKlassik.
The group's concert repertoire and discography features attractive and intelligently
arranged programs that embrace the entire history of the string quartet, from its pre-Haydn
beginnings through to Kurtág. The Hagen Quartet also works closely with composers of its
own generation, whether by reviving existing works or by commissioning and premiering new
pieces. Since mid-2013, the Hagen Quartet has been performing on instruments made by
Antonio Stradivari, known as the "Paganini" quartet, generously on loan by the Nippon Music
Foundation.
Pianist Kirill Gerstein is one of today's most intriguing and versatile musicians, with a
masterful technique, discerning intelligence, and a musical curiosity that has led him to
explore repertoire that spans centuries and a diverse range of styles. He is the recipient
of the 2010 Gilmore Artist Award and received first prize at the 2001 Arthur Rubinstein
International Piano Master Competition in Tel Aviv.
Highlights of Mr. Gerstein's US season include concerto performances with The Cleveland
Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, and Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, New Jersey, and San Diego
symphony orchestras. He also performs works by Busoni, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, and
Schoenberg, among others. With the New York Philharmonic last month, he performed
Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in the composer's own 1879 version of the score, marking
its New York premiere. In 2015, he won an ECHO Klassik award for his world-premiere
recording of this edition with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and in August
2016, he gave the US premiere with the Grant Park Orchestra. In recital this season, Mr.
Gerstein performs Liszt's complete Transcendental Etudes in Chicago, Seattle, and
Washington, DC. He last appeared at Zankel Hall in a performance of the entire cycle, along
with works by Bach and Bartók. His recent recording of Liszt's Transcendental
Etudes was released by Myrios Classics in September of last year.
Mr. Gerstein reunites with the Hagen Quartet in the Brahms Piano Quintet after a 2014
performance of the work in Austria. He has performed more recently with cellist Clemens
Hagen in a range of chamber repertoire, especially the works of Beethoven.
Born in Voronezh, Russia, Mr. Gerstein attended a music school for gifted children and
taught himself to play jazz by listening to his parents' extensive record collection. He
came to the US at the age of 14 to attend Boston's Berklee College of Music and, after
completing his studies in three years, moved to New York to attend the Manhattan School of
Music. An American citizen since 2003, Mr. Gerstein now divides his time between the US and
Germany.
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