We’re celebrating the National String Quartet Foundation all this week on The Full Score. The Foundation creates and sponsors projects which bring live chamber music to audiences throughout Ireland. It is committed to supporting Irish and Irish-based musicians who wish to explore the string quartet repertoire and presents around eighty concerts each year given by a wide variety of string quartets, all of them with Irish connections.
In today’s concert we’ll hear Ireland’s longest established string quartet, the ConTempo Quartet, founded in Bucharest in 1995 and based in Ireland since 2003. Mozart’s D major quartet K.499 is one of the lesser played but its ingeniously intertwined lines create a fascinating and absorbing sound world. Raymond Deane is one of our most celebrated composers and we’ll hear the first performances of his seventh string quartet. Dobrinka Tabakova’s playful quartet On a bench in the shade takes its inspiration from ‘hot summers days, when people gather to talk in the shade’. Beethoven’s C major Razumovsky quartet completes the programme, its sparklingly virtuosic outer movements contrasting with a moody funeral march and a quaintly old-fashioned minuet.
Mozart: String Quartet in D major K.499
Raymond Deane: String Quartet No.7
Dobrinka Tabakova: On a bench in the shade
Beethoven: String Quartet in C major Op.59 No.3 Razumovsky
ConTempo Quartet
Bogdan Sofei, violin
Ingrid Nicola, violin
Andreea Banciu, viola
Adrian Mantu, cello
RTÉ lyric fm, Monday 27th January, 1pm-4pm
