KANTOS QUARTET

Sarah Sew, violin

Hugh Murray, violin

Alexandros Koustas, viola

Aoife Burke, cello

This is an exciting new string quartet comprising four of our finest and most experienced musicians. Their programme looks both to music and events of the 1920s and to the upcoming bi-centenary of Beethoven’s death in 1827. Beethoven’s B flat quartet moves from a sprightly opening movement, through a gentle adagio and a wildly irregular scherzo, to its heart, a moving slow introduction to the finale which Beethoven entitled La Malinconia. The finale itself is curiously enigmatic, as if unsure how to react to the pathos of its opening.

Pulitzer prize winning composer Caroline Shaw took this Beethoven quartet as the blueprint of her 2016 quartet of that name and its transformation is both fascinating and entertaining. Irish-American composer Swan Hennessy’s beautiful second string quartet was written in memory of Terence MacSwiney, shortly after his death on hunger strike in 1920, the piece was premiered by four Dublin-based musicians at the World Congress of the Irish Race in Paris on the evening of 25 January 1922. The audience included Éamon de Valera, Countess Markievicz and Mary MacSwiney (sister of Terence). Leoš Janáček’s first string quartet Kreutzer Sonata was written in 1923 and inspired by Tolstoy’s novella of the same name, the music is raw, fragmented and intensely direct. Sudden contrasts and restless rhythmic energy create a compelling sense of drama.