The string quartet will interpret works by Debussy, Poulenc, Fauré, Ravel, Satie, Mendelssohn and the contemporary composer Trotignon.
The Auditorio de Tenerife has scheduled the concert Impresiones parisinas by the French ensemble Van Kuijk for Thursday, 25 September at 7.30 p.m. in its Chamber Hall. The concert was originally scheduled for April, but was postponed due to weather issues. The ensemble will perform works by Debussy, Poulenc, Fauré, Ravel, Satie and Mendelssohn. Additionally, the quartet will perform pieces influenced by these composers and commissioned from French composer and pianist Baptiste Trotignon.
Violinist Nicolas Van Kuijk leads the quartet, whose other members are violinist Sylvain Favre-Bulle, violist Emmanuel François, and cellist Anthony Kondo. The ensemble has won several international awards, including the Best Beethoven and Best Haydn prizes at the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, First Prize and the Audience Award at the Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition, and the Académie du Festival d’Aix prize. From 2015 to 2017, the BBC recognised the quartet as New Generation Artists, and for the 2017–18 season, it was recognised as ECHO Rising Stars.
Following its early successes, the ensemble has become a familiar face at major international venues, performing at the Wigmore Hall in London, the Philharmonie in Paris, the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Wiener Konzerthaus and the Musikverein in Vienna, to name a few. The ensemble has also performed at festivals such as the BBC Proms, Cheltenham, Heathrow and London’s Konserthuset, as well as the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon, the Tivoli Concert Series in Denmark, and the Konserthuset in Stockholm. Upcoming tours will see the quartet make highly anticipated debuts at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Sydney Opera House, the Melbourne Recital Centre, the QPAC in Brisbane, Australia, and the Shanghai Symphony Hall.
As Baptiste Trotignon has said, “The string quartet, the highest form of chamber music for several centuries, offers unlimited potential for exploration, from sophisticated, complex compositions to freer works. It is an enormous challenge and an aesthetically exciting adventure for me”. Ten years after the quartet first commissioned him (Empreintes in 2014), the ensemble contacted him again to compose five pieces based on the works of Poulenc, Fauré, Ravel, Satie and Debussy. The pieces should particularly emphasise the composers’ use of French melodies.
The result is a loving evocation in which all necessary liberties have been taken to ensure compositional pleasure, satisfy certain desires and experiment with sounds and rhythmic variations. The composer recalls that ‘all these desires were more than realised in the first performances by the Van Kuijk Quartet, which were full of lyricism, precision, joy, and audible beauty’. Trotignon reveals, “I also enjoyed occasionally inserting references to American music, and even Radiohead, into one of the pieces”.
The tickets can be purchased at a single price of €15 and €5 for audiences under 30 on the website www.auditoriodetenerife.com, at the auditorium’s box office, or by dialling the phone number 902 317 327 from Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Check the special discounts for students, unemployed people and large families, among others.