大象传媒

Live from Wigmore Hall, London

Presented by Martin Handley

The Artemis Quartet performs two classics of the string quartet repertoire alongside a recent work by Latvian composer Peteris Vasks.

Mozart: String Quartet in G (K387)

Peteris Vasks: String Quartet No. 5

8.10 Interval Music: choral music by Peteris Vasks and other Baltic composers

Smetana: String Quartet No. 1 in E minor ('From my life')

Artemis Quartet

The Artemis Quartet, this year celebrating its 25th anniversary, was founded in L眉beck but these days is based in Berlin. In tonight's concert the quartet performs two classics of the repertoire alongside a new work by Peteris Vasks.

Mozart's Quartet in G, completed on New Year's Eve 1782, is the first of the set composed in honour of Josef Haydn - the father of the string quartet. Nearly a century later, Smetana's Quartet in E minor has the subtitle 'From my Life' and has an autobiographical sub-text which looks back over the composer's life and loves - including his tinnitus and increasing deafness, events which led to a complete mental collapse a few years later.

The contemporary Latvian composer Peteris Vasks also reflects on the world in his String Quartet no 5 - music influenced by his compassion for 'a world tortured by grief and contradictions'.