ARMIDA QUARTETT

The ARMIDA QUARTET’S international breakthrough came in 2012 with the First Prize at the prestigious ARD International Music Competition in Munich, where the ensemble was also awarded the Audience Prize. Founded in Berlin in 2006, the quartet chose its name after Haydn’s opera Armida. The musicians studied with members of the Artemis Quartet and with Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartet, and received important artistic and interpretative guidance from Alfred Brendel, Robert Levin, Tabea Zimmermann and Natalia Prischepenko. Following concerts and radio recordings as BBC New Generation Artists and later as ECHO Rising Stars, the quartet has established itself as a regular guest in the world’s leading chamber music venues across Europe, Asia and the United States. Since 2021, the ensemble has frequently appeared at the Mecklenburg–Vorpommern and Rügen Festival. The Armida Quartet has continued to expand its artistic horizons with performances of Fragil for string quartet and electronics by Ramon Humet in Barcelona, appearances at the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn together with violist Tabea Zimmermann, as well as concerts at the Louvre in Paris and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Innovative ideas increasingly shape the ensemble’s artistic profile, among which the most significant is the Mozart string quartet cycle entitled Mozart Exploded. Through this unifying concept, the Armida Quartet highlights the elements of novelty and avant-garde thinking in Mozart’s musical language, juxtaposing each programme with a living composer such as Sofia Gubaidulina, Marko Nikodijević, Jörg Widmann or Ali-Sade. This project has been presented, among other venues, at the Morgan Library in New York. The quartet has also appeared with the Duisburg Philharmonic Orchestra in the performance of Daniel Schnyder’s Impetus, a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. The ensemble’s commitment to a critical revision of Mozart’s string quartets, completed in 2022, was highly praised by the British magazine Gramophone, which emphasized the interpretative integrity of the project, enriched by the profound emotional unity among the quartet members and their authentic understanding of Mozart’s stylistic language. In 2013, the Armida Quartet’s CD featuring works by Shostakovich, Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág received outstanding critical acclaim, as did the 2017 recording Fuga Magna. Among the artists with whom the Armida Quartet frequently collaborates are cellist Lise Berthaud, horn player Alec Frank-Gemill, the Van Kuijk Quartet, pianist Ewa Kupiec, cellist Maximilian Hornung, clarinettist Martin Fröst and baritone Thomas Hampson.