Schumann Quartett

Arnold Schönberg’s and Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets have long shared a common history. At the time, the Kolisch-Quartett already combined the premieres of Schönberg’s third and fourth quartet with late Beethoven. This juxtaposition of the advanced with the new underpinned not only Schönberg’s aspiration to be a bearer of tradition – it also consolidated the cult status of Beethoven’s late work. The German-Estonian Schumann Quartet serves as an exciting young quartet formation of this performance tradition – whereby the temporal interval between the two performed works is consciously cast extremely wide: Beethoven’s third “Rasumovsky-Quartett” with its never before heard harmonic progressions meets Schönberg’s final quartet from 1927: the highlight of a quartet series with which Beethoven not only extended form and sound of the string quartet genre into the quasi-symphonic but also laid the foundation for the habit of the public string quartet evenings we now know so well.