Leden van het Artemis Quartett & Elisabeth Leonskaja

Friedemann Weigle, the violist with the Artemis Quartet and professor at the Musikhochschule Hanns Eisler in Berlin, died early this July. He was for thirty years one of the most important figures on the international string quartet scene and was an impassioned mentor to countless young chamber music ensembles. He was a founding member of the Petersen Quartet, in which he played for twenty years. He had been a member of the Artemis Quartet since 2007.
deSingel offers its condolences to his family and colleagues and wishes them all the best.

The Artemis Quartet is now faced with the sad and difficult task of finding a new direction. This concert will be a commemorative one dedicated to Friedemann Weigle. Together with the pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya – for many years a musical partner of the Artemis Quartet – Vineta Sareika, Gregor Sigl and Eckart Runge will perform piano quartets by Brahms and Schumann.

Schumann’s Piano Quartet, opus 47, was written in what is called the composer’s ‘year of chamber music’ – from June 1842 to February 1843 – when he wrote three string quartets, a piano quintet and a piano quartet one after the other. The Piano Quartet was for a long time overshadowed by the more popular Quintet. Yet here too Schumann’s writing is at its best: expressive melodies, colourful harmonies and polyphonic voice leading combine into a structurally complex but clear whole with immediate appeal and a lasting impression.
Brahms’ monumental Third Piano Quartet has an autobiographical tint. Rarely has such oppressive music been written with this sort of painful intensity. As he himself tells us, Brahms was translating a hopeless situation into sound: his unrequited love for Clara Schumann.