The Arditti Quartet is celebrating a big-0 birthday this year. The composers featured this evening are also celebrating their fortieth: Erin Gee, Reinhard Fuchs, Johannes Maria Staud and Boris Hauf. The birthday concert given by this London quartet in Graz is thus a kind of family get-together to celebrate a shared passion for new music and a thirst for adventure that has persisted for decades.
The Arditti Quartet performed its first concert at the Royal Academy of Music in London in March 1974. Irvine Arditti has continued unswervingly along the same path which he resolutely embarked upon with that concert. In the four decades since its foundation, the ensemble has given more than 2,000 concerts, playing more than 7,400 works, including more than 600 premieres. musikprotokoll’s gift to the Arditti Quartet consists of a number of premieres too: forty minutes of music by four forty-year-olds on this fortieth birthday. Happy Birthday!

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