The Leipzig Quartet Sunday 18 March 2007, 8:30pm PASYDY Auditorium, Nicosia

The Leipzig Quartet

The Pharos Trust presents a concert by the Leipzig Quartet on Sunday 18 March 2007 at 8.30pm, at the PASYDY Auditorium in Nicosia.  The evening’s programme comprises works by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Puccini, Verdi and Mozart. The Leipzig Quartet will also give a student concert in Nicosia as part of the Trust’s Music Education Programme, developed in association with the Ministry of Education and Culture and supported by the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority.

Founded in 1988, the Leipzig String Quartet is now widely acclaimed as one of the most exciting string quartets on the international chamber music scene. Three of its members were principals in the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, before deciding in 1993 to devote all their time to the Quartet. The Quartet has studied with the Amadeus Quartet, Gerhard Bosse, Hatto Beyerle and Walter Levin, and was granted scholarships by the Amadeus Scholarship and the Foundation of Cultural Funds. Since then, the Quartet has won many international prizes, including the 1991 ARD Competition in Munich, the Busch Brothers Award in 1991 and the Siemens Music Award in 1992.

The Leipzig Quartet has toured more than 40 countries in Europe, North and South America, North Africa, Asia, Australia, Japan and Israel and has been invited to perform at major international festivals such as the Berliner Festwochen, Bregenzer Festspiele, Schubertiade Hohenems and the festivals of Schleswig-Holstein, Gstaad, Montpellier, Bath and Brighton, and has served as Quartet-in-Residence at the International European Festival of Stuttgart. 

In 1991 the Quartet established its own string quartet series at the Gewandhaus Leipzig, “Pro Quator”, where it has been offering, among others, a mutli-year cycle of the major quartets of the First and Second Viennese School. The Quartet has also been one of the initiators of the “Beethoven-Cycle”, in which six major European string quartets participated in performing all of the Beethoven string quartets in more than 15 European cities during the 97/98 season.

The Quartet’s wide repertoire, consisting of almost 300 works by 90 composers, is enriched and expanded by such chamber music partners as Juliane Banse, Christiane Oelze, Alfred Brendel, Hartmut Rohde, Michael Sanderling, Andreas Staier and Christian Zacharias. As member of the Leipzig-based Ensemble Avantgarde, the Quartet divides its time between performing contemporary music and music composed between 1900 and 1940. With this ensemble, the Quartet formed - in 1990 - the "musica nova" series at the Gewandhaus, and in 1993 it was awarded the Schneider-Schott prize of the City of Mainz.