QUARTETTO INDACO

Beethoven
In the catalog of Beethoven’s compositions, the sixteen string quartets, completed by the peremptory Grande Fuga, constitute a singular corpus, of which the musician himself recognized that they assumed an almost “historical” meaning: not only thanks to his own creative evolution, but also under the point of view of the genre and its presumed future. Because it is in addressing this fundamental chamber form step by step, through progressive research and subsequent solutions, that Beethoven unleashed his most open and decisive battle against conventions. He not only takes on the important legacies of Haydn and Mozart, but he creates an inventory suitable to overcome it permanently, completing a writing of absolute reference up to the dawn of the twentieth century.

These two concerts show the extremes of Beethoven’s compositional arc in the field of the string quartet: op. 18, also known as the Lobkowitz Quartets from the name of the noble dedicatee, is the first large collection of Beethoven quartets and covers the years from 1798 to 1800. Op. 135, on the other hand, closes the entire catalog. Of the six quartets that make up op. 18, the last three are proposed here according to the order of the collection, which in turn had not followed the chronological order of composition: in this sense, the last was in fact the number 4, while the number 5 was composed by fourth and number 6 as the penultimate to see the light. The number 4, in particular, written in the key of C minor at the time dear to the composer, is among Beethoven’s most popular.

The Quartet op. 74, completed in 1809, owes its nickname “of the harps” due to the frequent pizzicato of the strings prescribed in the first movement. The op. 135, completed in October 1826, a few months before the composer’s death, was originally in only three movements: it was perhaps the publisher Schlesinger, who asked Beethoven to add a fourth, namely the Lento. After the tendency towards monumentality manifested in the previous quartets, Beethoven closes the expression of his creative genius with an extreme masterpiece of smaller dimensions, in the clear key of F major.

Download the original program in PDF (in Italian)

The Indaco Quartet was formed in 2007 at the Scuola di Musica in Fiesole thanks to the impetus of Piero Farulli and Andrea Nannoni. They are now considered one of the most interesting Italian string quartets of their generation.

They have attended specialization courses with protagonists of the main string quartets of our time, such as Hatto Beyerle, Günther Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartet and Rainer Schmidt of the Hagen Quartet. In 2017, they obtained a Master in Chamber Music at the Musikhochschule in Hannover under the guidance of Oliver Wille, violinist of the Kuss Quartet. After studying at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena within the Chamber Music Course held by Günther Pichler, the Indaco Quartet performed in Siena during the “Micat In Vertice” Concert Season and abroad in the context of the project “Young Italian Musical Talents in world ”promoted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in collaboration with the Accademia Musicale Chigiana.

The Quartet won the Scotese Prize in 2017, the “Boersen Club Hannover”, the special prize “Jeunesses Musicales” at the International Competition “Premio P. Borciani” 2014 and was among the finalists of the same Competition in 2017.

Many works by contemporary composers have been dedicated to the quartet and in 2021 they are participating in the “Dante21” project in collaboration with the “Sconfinarte” publishing house in Milan, which involves 34 living Italian composers for the songs of Dante’s Inferno.