SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA & STRING QUARTET– GOOD REASONS FOR A DOUBLE LIFE

Everything started with Joseph Haydn: It is him we have to thank for the ‚creation’ of symphony and string quartet, the two cornerstones of classical instrumental music. Haydn left many significant pieces in both categories and, thereby, set a path which was followed by composers like W. A. Mozart, L. v. Beethoven, F. Schubert, F. Mendelssohn, R. Schumann, J. Brahms or D. Schostakowitsch.

They have all written remarkable symphonies, as well as string quartets, which excel in extraordinary musical imaginativeness, eagerness to experiment and incomparable profoundness, with - regarding the quartets - a fascinating concentration and focus on four voices.

Here, there are no more embellishments, no padding, wrapping, packaging, here the musical soul of the composer lays open. The string quartet, as it were, is the quintessence of the symphony.

Now, if four musicians of a symphony orchestra come across the above mentioned composers over many years in their orchestral lives, namely through celebrities such as Wolfgang Sawallisch, Georges Prêtre, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Wladimir Fedosejev, Fabio Luisi or Philippe Jordan, then they achieve something like a collective subconscious. In their quartet lives this subconscious allows them to find a common native language.
It is exactly this mutual language, which SYMPHONY4VIENNA has crystalized.