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ARTISTS: NGA5

Van Kuijk Quartet

DATE: Monday 20 February 2017

PRESENTER: Clemency Burton-Hill

PRODUCER: Tony Sellors

LEAD PRODUCER: Lindsay Kemp (07905 399212)

PC: Lucy Eliot-Higgitt

EDITOR: Emma Bloxham (07814 332062)

STUDIO MANAGERS: Pete Smith; Richard Andrews

LIVE TRAIL: Time TBC

REHEARSAL: 10:00-12:00

PROGRAMME NUMBER: 16BB2004LB0

PROGRAMME DETAILS: Schubert: String Quartet No.10 in E flat major,

op.125 No.1, D.87

c.21

Ravel: String Quartet

c.29

TOTAL: c.50’ + encore requested

CBH

It was here at Wigmore in 2015 that the young French-based ensemble the Van Kuijk

Quartet burst into our consciousness, triumphing in the International String Quartet

Competition and scooping both the Best Haydn and Best Beethoven Awards. They

joined us as BBC New Generation Artists last season, and they have continued to win

awards and dazzle audiences around Europe including Cheltenham, Verbier, Aix-en-

Provence and Stavanger festivals – and they will soon grace stages at the Louvre in

Paris, Zurich Tonhalle and the Musikverein Vienna.

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Two works on the programme today, both written by men in the prime of youth;

later on, we’ll hear Ravel’s striking string quartet from 1904, premiered when he was

28 - and the Van Kuijks begin with a Schubert string quartet in E flat major, written in

November 1813, the same month he left the Imperial Seminary to train as a primary

school teacher. We’ll never know what sort of a teacher Schubert would have made

because even by then his real vocation was already evident. At just sixteen, his skills

as a composer were undeniable. And as Richard Bratby makes clear in his

programme notes today, by this quartet, his tenth, he had “finally broken away from

his youthful habit of thinking of a quartet as a pocket–size symphony.” We can hear

the influence of Mozart, of Haydn, but the compositional voice is already

unmistakably Schubertian.

To perform it live at Wigmore Hall this lunchtime, the Van Kuijk Quartet…

MUSIC

SCHUBERT String Quartet No.10 in E flat major Op.125 No.1, D.87

Van Kuijk Quartet

LIVE c.21

CBH

B/A

The players Nicolas Van Kuijk, Sylvain Favre-Bulle, Emmanuel Francois and Francois

Robin… They are resident in ProQuartet Paris, where they study with members of

the Alban Berg, Artemis and Hagen quartets…

And it was in Paris that the next work we’ll hear was premiered, in 1904 – the only

string quartet of Maurice Ravel, a work of tremendous vivacity and freshness that –

like the Schubert we’ve just heard – shows a young composer in full control of his

gifts and his own distinct musical voice. At this stage in his career however, Ravel

had already garnered a few detractors – those who accused him, for example, of

aping Debussy, and those whose feathers were ruffled by the way he’d acted as a

deliberate provocateur to the Paris Conservatoire and the judges of that era’s most

prestigious composition competition, the Prix de Rome.

Nevertheless, one of Ravel’s most ardent admirers was Gabriel Faure, so his

description of the quartet’s finale as “stunted, badly balanced, and act of failure”

must have stung, not least because Faure was the dedicatee of the very work itself…

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No matter, none other than Debussy advised Ravel: “Don’t touch anything, and all

will be well”. And indeed all has been well; the work has entered the chamber music

canon as one of the great 20th-century cornerstones of the genre.

Here to play it live at Wigmore Hall this lunchtime, the Van Kuijk Quartet…

MUSIC

RAVEL String Quartet

Van Kuijk Quartet

LIVE c.29

CBH

B/A

[Encore?]

Next week: David Greilsammer (pianos – two pianos, one prepared) performs

Sonatas by Scarlatti and Cage [??]