Kuss Quartet

공연 정보

Since its founding in 1993, the Berlin‐based Kuss Quartet has progressively gained a reputation as one of the most highly praised German ensembles.

Kurtag’s Quartet op.1 is of capital importance in the composer’s work as in his life. This Hungarian composer, who studied in Budapest in the post‐war years under the Iron Curtain of Communism, felt inhibited in his creative efforts by the work of Bartók, whom he greatly admired. Dissatisfied with his early works, he mercilessly destroyed them all. Travelling to Paris to study in 1957, he met the psychologist Marianne Stein, who encouraged him to concentrate on shorter works. This liberated his full creative power and autonomy: the quartet would be the first work in which he became fully himself, and he has been a major presence in contemporary music ever since.

The Third Quartet (2001) of Lachenmann, the undisputed master of concrete instrumental music (integrating noise as an element of composition, but here produced by real instruments), reintegrates traditional sonic events, such as a C major chord, a “strange (element that) can at the same time be the object of a new experience”. Inspired by Tolstoy’s novel, Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata quartet is a veritable opera without words, a psychological drama where each instrument becomes a character in the play, endowed with expression, the pained cry of unrequited love.