Sunday Concerts – Badke Quartet

The Badke Quartet, celebrating its 11th anniversary this year, is widely recognised as one of Britain’s finest string quartets. Winners of the 1st prize and audience prize at the 5th Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition in 2007, the Badke Quartet has received widespread acclaim for its energetic and vibrant performances.

The Quartet has worked with some of the world’s greatest members of the Alban Berg Quartet in Cologne. From 2005 to 2009 the Quartet held the Senior Leverhulme Chamber Music Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music.

This performance will feature the UK première of Max Bruch’s Quartet in C minor. In 1852, the 14-year-old Max Bruch submitted this string quartet for the coveted scholarship offered by the Frankfurt-based Mozart Foundation and was unanimously judged the best from the eleven applications by the three judges. Even at this age, the young Bruch had produced an impressive work, even though some of his music had already been successfully performed in public concerts in his home city of Cologne.

As a 12-year-old child prodigy, Bruch received some lessons in composition from Ferdinand Hiller and after his years of study, lived and worked as composer and/or conductor in Koblenz (1865), Sondershausen (1867), Liverpool (1880), Breslau (1883) and Berlin (1890), where he died in 1920 at the age of 82. Apart from his best known work, the Violin Concerto No.1 in G minor, Op.26, he produced a range of compositions, namely operas, oratorios, orchestral and chamber music as well as songs and choral music. This string quartet had been presumed lost until 2013.

The first performance of this string quartet took place on 15 September 2014 in Frankfurt and the score and parts are now published.

Charlotte Scott violin
Emma Parker violin
Jon Thorne viola
Jonathan Byers cello

Pre-concert talk at 17.30 with Dr. Christopher Fifield.

Tickets: £10. Free entry for under-26s (courtesy of the CAVATINA Ticket Scheme).

Doors open at 17.30.