Travel Diaries Goldmund Quartet

A string quartet that bubbles with so much youthful enthusiasm as the Goldmund Quartet and yet has been playing concerts to international audiences and winning prizes for the past ten years, all with the same line-up, is something that is hard to find. The Goldmunds’ Travel Diaries are the musical journal of their past shared decade and a sound document that reflects on the past while looking very much to the future.

The four Munich musicians Florian Schötz (first violin), Pinchas Adt (second violin), Christoph Vandory (viola) & Raphael Paratore (cello) bring together on their new album five contemporary works by composers with whom they have previously worked. Fazıl Say kicks off with his Divorce Quartet, in which the four musicians give their interpretation of an intense, energy-charged work by one of the best known composers of our time. “The psychological essence of the work can, up to a point, be figuratively transferred to the music-making and interaction between the members of a string quartet. We strive among ourselves to achieve the expression of profound emotions, we go through ups and downs.”

Dobrinka Tabakova, whose work The Smile of the Flamboyant Wings was written expressly for the Goldmund Quartet as an ECHO commission for their Rising Stars tour, is the youngest composer on the album. The quartet was intimately involved with the work’s composition: “We played the early sketches to her in Skype sessions and talked to her about them. We improvised together. We experimented with various soundscapes and timbres. We researched the different constellations of melody and accompaniment. We were out in Munich drinking beer … and eventually we learned: ‘I’ve just sent you the finished score!’”

Wolfgang Rihm’s String Quartet no. 4 will always remind the Goldmund Quartet how they got to know their mentor Günter Pichler, first violin of the legendary Alban Berg Quartet. They wanted to play him this ambitious work, completely underestimated it and had to go to a great deal of trouble to get it right. It is now one of their “all-time favourites” and forms an integral part of their concert repertoire.

The temperature was in the forties Celsius (round 100° F.) when the quartet was working on Commedia dell’arte III in Aix-en-Provence with its composer Ana Sokolovic. “The rehearsals together made the string quartet into a piece of impromptu theatre that we were delighted to perform a few days later. There is always something liberating about playing the Commedia dell’arte III in concert and it’s an amusing experience every time, both for us and for the audience.”

The last composer whom the Goldmund Quartet meets in their Travel Diaries is also the guitarist of the US rock band The National, Bryce Dessner. His piece Aheym is a powerful tribute to home and the homeland. (Aheym is Yiddish for “homeward”.)

The Travel Diaries are a snapshot of the Goldmund Quartet, a moment in time. After Haydn and Shostakovich they have anchored themselves in the here and now as an ensemble that has already achieved a lot and will attract a lot more attention in the future.