DEBUT CD of the winner of the ARD Competition 2012

For your début CD you have selected three technically challenging works by 20th-century Hungarian composers. Why such an ambitious choice?

We find it interesting to explore lines of tradition: Ligeti’s and Kurtág’s quartets are directly related to Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. And Bartók himself was part of a line of tradition that went back to the string quartets of Beethoven. We are not attempting to throw a spotlight on our technical abilities, although these works admittedly contain many interesting challenges.

You have often performed these works in concert. Audiences were not only thrilled, but for your rendition of the Ligeti Quartet you received a Special Prize at Geneva International Music Competition. How can you explain the fascination exerted by this music on performers and audiences alike? What aspects are you trying to emphasize? The fascination probably stems from the fact that composers such as Bartók or Ligeti are still perceived as “modern”. Mozart’s string quartets are performed quite often, and Beethoven’s quartets are now purported to be more or less “understood”: this is all music with which audiences have become familiar to a certain extent. On the other hand, we want to help audiences lose their fear of the “Great Unknown”, just as we, the performers, find ourselves diving again and again into uncharted waters. To us, as well, a score at first seems like an insurmountable challenge with its myriad of notes, accidentals, rhythmic displacements and well-nigh impossible metronome indications. The anguish level is initially quite high, not to mention the tension we experience when we are about to go onstage for a first performance. But once we have acquired a certain degree of confidence, we experience our best moments when that very confidence helps our audience become sincerely thrilled.

What do these works have in common, what differentiates them? First of all, the three works emit a kind of gripping, life-affirming energy – certainly in different ways, but in Bartók and Ligeti this is unmistakable. Yet even certain tiny musical details in Kurtág’s Opus 1 continue to evoke the kind of energy a person feels when recovering from a difficult life phase. In terms of form, Kurtág is closely following Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet since both pieces have a bridge structure. Finally, Ligeti’s associates his string quartet with Bartók through its character – the overflowing emotion, the multitude of folklore elements.