Festival

Chaos String Quartet

Susanne Schäffer violin
Eszter Kruchió violin
Sara Marzadori viola
Bas Jongen cello

 

 

Anton Webern 5 Sätze für Streichquartett op. 5 (1909)

György Ligeti String Quartet No. 2 (1968)

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati Pluriel (1991)

Francesca Verunelli Secondo Quartetto (2015-2016)

György Kurtág Officium Breve, in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, op. 28, for string quartet (1988/1989)

Josef Matthias Hauer Zwölftonspiel für Streichquartett (1957)

 

Further program information

"You still have to have chaos in you to give birth to a dancing star." (Friedrich Nietzsche)

The Chaos String Quartet's motto is to follow its very own and fundamentally sincere path, a path that seeks to overcome supposed boundaries. And so the combination of tradition and contemporary tendencies is inscribed in the string quartet's DNA, interdisciplinary performance projects and children's concerts are developed, in the case of "Free The Franz" with the Hungarian jazz saxophonist István Grencsó again, Schubert is placed in a new context, and other unusual ways of programming are taken to open up unexpected rooms and bring audiences from different backgrounds on a joint path of listening. For their first appearance at impuls, the four musicians span more than a century of music history, including also a graphic score as well as a late composition by Josef Matthias Hauer, who, like the much better known composer Arnold Schönberg, developed his own version of twelve-tone composition already in the 10s of the 20th century.

Recently selected as a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist 2023-2025, the Chaos String Quartet is rapidly establishing itself on the international music scene. The quartet has won prizes at major international competitions such as Bad Tölz (2023), Haydn (2023), ARD (2022) and Bordeaux (2022), among others, and has already been invited to many international music festivals and renowned concert halls, including the Musikverein Vienna, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Wigmore Hall and Philharmonie de Paris in the 2023-2024 season. In addition to working with his mentor Johannes Meissl in Vienna as part of the ECMAster program, the quartet completed postgraduate studies at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole with the Cuarteto Casals. It received further musical inspiration from Eberhard Feltz, Patrick Jüdt, Rainer Schmidt (Hagen Quartet), Hatto Beyerle (Alban Berg Quartet), András Keller (Keller Quartet), Oliver Wille (Kuss Quartet) and the Arditti Quartet as well as from composers such as Helmut Lachenmann.

Susanne Schäffer plays a violin by Carlo Giuseppe Testore (c. 1710), kindly on loan from the MERITO String Instruments Trust and Bas Jongen plays a cello by Hendrick Jacobs (Amsterdam, 1696), kindly loaned to him by the Dutch Musical Instruments Foundation (NMF).