The Australian String Quartet is formerly known as the Tankstream Quartet. In 2007, the latter received official government backing and was renamed, continuing a tradition of many years and entitling the quartet to receive special subsidies and fulfil official tasks.

Australian String Quartet

In the Beethoven House in Bonn, the four musicians played "High Tension Wires," written by Australian composer Nigel Westlake in 1994. Westlake did not study composition, but film and television. He has written film music as well as conventional symphonies. The quartet made "High Tension Wires" a truly electrifying experience for the audience.

The Australian String Quartet also ventured into the very heart of German Romanticism with Felix Mendelssohn's Quartet No. 1. In the "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik," Mendelssohn's friend Robert Schumann once called him the "Mozart of the 19th century." The four musicians interpreted this quartet with exuberant musicality and tonal brilliance.

Pavel Haas Quartet

The Pavel Haas Quartet is named after the Czech composer Pavel Haas, a pupil of Leos Janacek. Haas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Most of the compositions he wrote in concentration camp were lost.

The use of percussion in a string quartet concert is unusual, but it occurred twice during this performance. One instance was a composition by the Berlin-born British composer Alexander Goehr: "Since Brass, nor Stone," dedicated "To the memory of Pavel Haas and his colleagues." Goehr was inspired by Shakespeare's Sonnet 65 to compose a reflection on death and the transitory nature of existence:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea / But sad mortality o'er-sways their power / …O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out / Against the wreckful siege of battering days / When rocks impregnable are not so stout / Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? …

When Pavel Haas composed his String Quartet No. 2 in 1925, he could not foresee any of the horrors that Nazism would bring. He wrote: "This completely carefree work is dominated by the impulse of motion, bird calls, the rumbling of village carts, the beating of the human heart …" Haas was inspired by a visit to the Moravian mountains. In the city where he lived, the Moravian capital Brno, people called this backwoods area the "Monkey Mountains."

Haas originally conceived the work for a jazz band. The percussion part, which he deleted from the work after the first performance, was long lost and rediscovered only recently. The concert ended with a passionate Vivace (entitled "A Wild Night") that also uses percussion, thus concluding as it had begun: with "high tension."

Program:

Nigel Westlake

"High Tension Wires," string quartet no. 1

Felix Mendelssohn

String Quartet no. 1 for 2 violins, viola and cello in D major, op. 44

Alexander Goehr

"Since Brass, nor Stone" - Fantasia for string quartet and percussion, op. 80

Pavel Haas

String Quartet op. 7 no. 2 ("From the Monkey Mountains")

Performed by:

Australian String Quartet

Pavel Haas Quartet

Performed at the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, on September 19, 2009 and recorded by Deutsche Welle.

Marita Berg/gz/kjb