So great to be starting the season with a tour of Holland and Belgium, motherlands of two of the quartet, Daniel and Jacky. And what greets you as you enter International Gare de Midi in Brussels ? Our national hero, Tintin!
Bruges was great - a concert in the round in a very beautiful chamber hall at the Concertgebouw, and we played 'musical chairs' so we could each face a different way for every piece on the programme. The first concert was in Overveen, a lovely small town with a thriving music society, which I discovered with great interest to be the home for several years of the great violinist Zoltan Szekely, exiled from Hungary in the '20s and offered a home, food and security here in return for concerts. ("l'art pour lard" as it was known!) He and fellow refugees actually founded this society and he became concertmeister of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, before fleeing the nazis and finally settling in Canada, where we had the good luck to study with him many years later.
Heading back into Holland now for concerts in Utrecht - in the wonderful newly developed Vredenburg - and in Leiden - the complete Shostakovich cycle over the coming weekend.
Sitting here on the train I'm looking back over the last year and trying to work out how I let this Blog slip off my radar so badly! The last entry was in 2013! Very bad…will try better this year. 2014 was indeed a bumper year with lots to report, so there was no excuse! The year was beautifully bookended by concerts in the fantastic Chamber Music Unwrapped season at Kings Place, London, where we are delighted to be quartet in residence. The series was a ground-breaking show-case of the top 50 chamber works as voted by the public and performed by many different groups. We had three concerts throughout the year, including two Beethovens, two Bartok and the two great clarinet quintets, with Michael Collins with whom we released a recording of the Brahms earlier in the year.
We were also busy recording all the Zemlinsky quartets - what a fantastic and sadly neglected output. The release is this spring and will be accompanied by a day at King's Place at which we will perform the whole set.
We also took part in the centenary celebrations of Andre Panufnik, also coinciding with the release of the string quartets and sextets, as well as a new work written for us by his daughter, Roxanna. Throughout the year we were delighted to meet and make friends with that wonderful family and to discover the music of this great man. Again, King's Place pulled off a brilliant event.
As well as these home-based activities, we did a lot of travelling, most notably a return to Mexico for a really great tour. Starting in Oaxaca where we spent 10 days with lovely, talented and enthusiastic students of the fantastic 'Instumenta' festival. It is so heart-warming to come across such a well-organised and friendly festival, with the highest cultural values as well as a good sense of humour and adventure,and most of all great food and drink! Tomas Barreiro, Gustavo Martin and the team gave us such a great time. And to top it all, an excursion in our one free afternoon to the top of Monte Alban, the extraordinary ancient city of the Zapotecs, which should surely be one of the wonders of the world.
Then on to Mexico City, Morelia and Leon, under the great care of the Anglo-Mexican Foundation completed a great couple of weeks.
We had a fabulous time in the autumn touring Sweden and Denmark, which meant several journeys over The Bridge, singing to ourselves the wonderful song that evokes so well the dark atmosphere of that brilliant TV series…
A few trips around Europe completed a really great year. Now embarking on another with exciting trips ahead, which I will do my best to report on… ;)
