The Isidore String Quartet is a young quartet founded in 2019, but not too young to win the important 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada in 2022. Based in New York City, the quartet cultivates "joyful, accessible and intimate experiences" with the listener. In this respect, their great inspiration is the famous Juilliard String Quartet (first violinist Isidore Cohen is their namesake), by whom it feels strongly influenced. And so it comes to performances where the established repertoire is brought as new, and the new as established. Thanks to its victory at the Banff Competition, the Isidore Quartet is now making an extensive tour of America and Europe.
Sonnenquartette are called Haydn's six string qua…
The Isidore String Quartet is a young quartet founded in 2019, but not too young to win the important 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada in 2022. Based in New York City, the quartet cultivates "joyful, accessible and intimate experiences" with the listener. In this respect, their great inspiration is the famous Juilliard String Quartet (first violinist Isidore Cohen is their namesake), by whom it feels strongly influenced. And so it comes to performances where the established repertoire is brought as new, and the new as established. Thanks to its victory at the Banff Competition, the Isidore Quartet is now making an extensive tour of America and Europe.
Sonnenquartette are called Haydn's six string quartets opus 20 - the second one of which from which is on the programme - because the first edition depicted a rising sun. Not a bad symbol: these special quartets marked the dawn of a new way of writing quartets that would prove influential from Mozart and Haydn through to Brahms. From the latter we hear his Quartet no. 2, written during a summer holiday in 1873 at Lake Starnberg, with the Bavarian mountains in the background. Not just any quartet, as Brahms is said to have burned what he considered to be twenty unsuccessful quartets before this one. Underlying Dinuk Wijeratne's quartet Disappearance of Lisa Gherardini is a true story: the brutal theft of the world's most famous painting, Da Vinci's Mona Lisa, from the Louvre in 1911.
