8 July 2012: the Badke Quartet
The performers
Lana Trotovsek and Emma Parker violins, Jon Thorne viola and Jonathan Byers cello
Background
This is the third time the Badke have played at Cratfield, but the first visit to us for their new first violin Lana, who joined them in time for their residency and concerts in the 2011 Aldeburgh Music winter series at the Jubilee Hall. The quartet, formed in 2002, is widely recognised as one of Britain’s finest. It won the 1st prize and audience prize at the 5th Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition in 2007.
It has worked with some of the world’s greatest string quartets and all four musicians are graduates of London’s Royal Academy of Music and Royal College of Music. They regularly study with Gabor Takács-Nagy at IMS Prussia Cove and during 2006-08 they travelled once a month for a period of intensive study at the Alban Berg Quartet’s chamber music class in Cologne.
From 2005 to 2009 the quartet held the Senior Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellowship at the RAM. In 2009 the Badke made its Musikverein début in Vienna, performed with Mark Padmore in France and returned to Ireland for a Music Network Tour. The quartet also performed twice at the Wigmore Hall and at London’s newest chamber music venue, Kings Place. The 2010 season saw the Quartet make its début at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, just after its last visit to Cratfield.
For more details, click here to go to the Badke’s own website.
Playing at Cratfield
The concert is at 3pm on Sunday 8 July 2012.
Concert programme
Mozart, String quartet in F (‘Prussian no 3’) K590 (1790)
Shostakovich, String quartet no 10 in A flat op 118 (1964)
INTERVAL
Tomkins (arr David Byers), A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes (1646)
Maxwell Davies, A Sad Paven for these Distracted Tymes op 244 (2004)
Beethoven, String quartet in F minor op 95 (‘Serioso’) (1810)
About the programme
The Badke open with Mozart’s String quartet in F K590, his last work for the medium and the third of those written for King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia (in the unfulfilled hope of a position at court: Mozart hoped to curry favour with the cellist-king via a prominent part for that instrument). They next play Shostakovich’s String quartet no 10, described by Wendy Lesser as ‘his harshest but also his friendliest’, dedicated to his fellow-composer Moishe Weinberg. Over three centuries before, Thomas Tomkins wrote his ‘Sad Paven’ for keyboard on watching his cathedral organ at Worcester dismantled by Parliamentary forces in the Civil War; Jonny Byers’ father David arranged it for string quartet, but Sir Peter Maxwell Davies ‘re-imagined’ it as a test piece for the 2005 Premio Paulo Borciani string quartet competition. The winners that year were the Pavel Haas Quartet, who then flew from Rome to Orkney to give the first UK performance. Beethoven’s String quartet in F minor op 95 is usually classed as the start of his ‘late quartets’; Joseph Kerman describes it as ‘an involved, impassioned, highly idiosyncratic piece, problematic in every one of its movements, advanced in every way’.
CDs
During November 2011, the Badke are recording Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F minor op 80 for Champs Hill Records.
Ticket availability (click here for the Tickets page)
£14.50: booking not yet open
£11: booking not yet open
£8: booking not yet open
Click here for a plan of the church, showing the location of seats at the different prices for 2012; the PDF file will either open in a new window or be downloaded to your computer, depending on your own browser settings or preferences.