Apollon Musagète Quartett

Six years ago the Apollon Musagète Quartett thundered into the chamber music world with a real prize struggle at the ARD Wettbewerb in Munich. Since then these four gents have had the wind in their sails: a successful tour with the singer Tori Amos, a high-profile CD of 20th-century Polish works – this quartet will tackle anything.
In this concert programme the ensemble once again focuses attention on its Polish roots. Waclaw of Szamotul, for example, was a great master of the Renaissance motet. Among other things he wrote a superb setting of the hymn ‘Juz sie zmierzcha’ (‘It is already getting dark’). At least four centuries later, the same melody was to form the theme of Henryk Górecki’s First String Quartet. Karol Szymanowski’s First String Quartet is a wondrous amalgam of ingenious mixtures of timbre, late-romantic chromatics and a good dose of folk music. Antonín Dvorák’s was very familiar with the last ingredient too, though this Czech composer shaped his Eleventh Quartet in accordance with a strikingly classical pattern.