Sarah Dayan, violon
Cécile Roubin, violon
Guillaume Becker, alto
Lydia Shelley , violoncelle
For seventeen years, the Voce have cultivated their idea of the string quartet, polymorphous and adventurous. Winners of numerous international competitions, they have toured the world, from Helsinki to Cairo and from Tokyo to Bogota. They are committed to defending the great pieces of the classical repertoire, alone or alongside exceptional artists such as Yuri Bashmet or Gary Hoffman. Their curiosity also leads them to experiment with multiple forms of performance: they lend their voices to masterpieces of silent cinema, and share the stage with personalities as diverse as the eclectic cellist Vincent Segal, the singers Kyrie Kristmanson and Aynur, the choreographer Thomas Lebrun, the Christian & François Ben Aïm company, and the accordionist Vincent Peirani. They regularly commission and create music by contemporary composers.
After studying with the Ysaye Quartet, Günter Pichler, the charismatic first violinist of the Alban Berg Quartet, and Eberhard Feltz, the Voce are keen to pass on their know-how and passion for chamber music to the younger generations. Since 2010, they have been running the string quartet course in Seine Saint-Denis in conjunction with ProQuartet and conservatories, and in 2017, with the committed support of the town of Vendôme and Monceau Assurances, they created “Quatuor à Vendôme”, a festival-academy devoted to chamber music. From the beginning of the academic year 2021, the Quatuor Voce will become an ensemble in residence at the HEM-Geneva to teach string quartet.
In recent seasons, the Voce Quartet has toured the world, including Japan, Colombia, Australia and the United States, as well as numerous concerts throughout Europe: in Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom, not to mention concerts in major French venues (Opéra de Nantes, Philharmonie de Paris, TAP de Poitiers, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, etc.). The Voce Quartet has performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Philharmonic Halls of Paris, Berlin, Cologne and Luxembourg, BOZAR in Brussels, Victoria Hall in Geneva, Kioi Hall in Tokyo, Teatro Colon in Bogota, La Fenice in Venice…
Their recordings of Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bartók, Janáček and Schulhoff have been acclaimed and recommended by the international press, including The Strad, Télérama (FFFF), Suddeutsch Zeitung, Diapason (5 Diapasons), The Guardian… Their privileged relationship with the Alpha Classics label has already given rise to five recordings as a quartet, and in collaboration with such renowned artists as Juliette Hurel and Lise Berthaud. On the strength of numerous encounters with improvisers from a wide range of backgrounds, the Voce have come up with “Itinéraire”, a 16-string journey from Brazil to Indonesia, via Iran, Cuba and Egypt. A new repertoire on the edge of written and improvised music is created in close collaboration with five composers. The album “Itinéraire” was released in autumn 2018. In the autumn of 2019, their fifteenth anniversary album will be released, devoted to the fifteenth quartets of Mozart and Schubert. They also appear on the album “Ballad in Red” (Aparté) by Emmanuel Ceysson, principal harp of the LA Philharmonic Orchestra and for the Klarthe label in the Brahms quintet with clarinettist Florent Héau.
To be released over the next two seasons, ‘Poétiques de l’Instant’, a new project consisting of two recordings devoted to French music and creation (Debussy, Ravel, Bruno Mantovani, Yves Balmer), in which the Voce are joined by the soprano Jodie Devos, Rémi Delangle, Juliette Hurel and Emmanuel Ceysson.
