QUATUOR DIOTIMA STRING QUARTET
JANUARY 11, 2011 | 7:30 PM
In January 2011, the Austrian Cultural Forum presented Quatuor Diotima, an internationally acclaimed Paris-based string quartet, whose reputation rests on their rare ability to perform at the highest level both classical and the most demanding contemporary pieces.
Quatuor Diotima was founded by graduates of the Paris and Lyon Conservatoires: Naaman Sluchin (violin 1 & 2), Yun-Peng Zhao (violin 1 & 2), Franck Chevalier (viola) and Pierre Morlet (violoncello). Their repertoire ranges from Haydn to the composers of our time, with particular focus on the Classical Period, French Romanticism, the early Twentieth Century, and a selection of major works from the last 50 years. An equally significant part of their activity is the performance and dissemination of newly commissioned works.
The quartet has appeared at many major concert venues and music festivals in Europe, Japan, USA, Central and South America, China, and Korea. Highlights of 2010 and beyond include appearances at the Cité de la Musique Paris, Sydney Festival, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, The Frick Collection New York and Wigmore Hall London. Gramophone called it “One of the five quartets you should know about,' and The Guardian said “they deserve a place alongside the quartets of Ferneyhough, Rihm and Nono as one of the most important European contributions to the genre in the last 30 years.”
On January 19, 2011, Allan Kozinn reviewed the concert at the ACFNY for The New York Times:
"The Diotima Quartet, based in Paris, looks as if its members were not long out of the conservatory and plays with the energy and passion of a newly minted ensemble. But it has been building its reputation for the last dozen years, largely through its new-music performances and an eclectic discography. [...] At the Austrian Cultural Forum the quartet put its modernist side on display. The ability to switch gears quickly and fluidly, as it did in the Janacek, served it particularly well here, and that talent was tested immediately in the restlessly assertive String Quartet No. 6 (2010) by the Scottish composer James Dillon. [...] After the Dillon, Webern’s Five Movements (1909) sounded like an antiquity. It was not that the players underemphasized Webern’s free use of dissonance and spare, often eerie timbres; they reveled in them. But they also made the most of occasional backward glances that, even where they last only a bar or two, offer what in this reading seemed a wistful memory of a vanishing world. [...] Thomas Larcher’s spacious, five-movement “Madhares” (2007), a work it recorded for an ECM compilation of Mr. Larcher’s music, released last year. It is an extraordinary piece: like the Dillon, it is rich in effects, and its language can be abstruse, even terrifying.
One section seemed to combine the avian swarm of Hitchcock’s “Birds” with the violin stabs in Bernard Hermann’s “Psycho” score. Yet these tense sections often melt into something entirely different — modal, folksy melodies, refracted through lightly dissonant harmonies, for example, or unabashedly shimmering Romanticism. The score, inspired by the White Mountains of Crete, was both familiar and otherworldly, and left a listener eager to hear it again."
Read the full New York Times Review here.
Audio recording from the event: Thomas Larcher's Madhares
Photos of the event (click to enlarge):
