Piatti Quartet

Mark-Anthony Turnage is one of the most played and most celebrated contemporary composers, blending classical and jazz idioms, modernism and tradition. The Piattis have a close relationship with Turnage; the artists premièred his Second Quartet at Wigmore Hall in 2016, and commissioned and performed this Fourth Quartet in 2019.

Next comes one of the most popular and recognisable of all string quartets: Dvorák's 'American' Quartet was written in 1893, when the composer lived in the United States. Dvorák was struck by the rich folk-music traditions he found, in whose melodies he discovered "all that is needed for a great and noble school of music".

The evening ends again with Beethoven. His Quartet No 7, one of his three 'Razumovsky' Quartets, was more complex and dramatic than anything previously conceived in the genre. Earlier chamber music had been written for the pleasure of aristocratic amateur musicians, but the Razumovskys moved it into the concert hall and the repertoire of the first professional string quartets.