David Petrlik, violin
Yoan Brakha, violin
Hortense Fourrier, viola
Rémi Carlon, cello
The Elmire Quartet, founded in 2017, is one of those young ensembles that you tell yourself will stop at nothing. Winners of second prize at the Geneva Competition and a special prize from the Fondation Etrillard for the most outstanding artistic project, they are now among the four quartets in residence for Vibre! 2024.
For the occasion, they have chosen an ambitious program with Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. Commissioned for Holy Week by the Santa Cueva church in Cadiz, Spain, and originally written for orchestra, the work alternates between the narrator’s words and musical moments. Faced with this delicate specification, Haydn succeeded in writing a score that is both meditative and theatrically powerful. “To make seven adagios follow one another without tiring the listener was not an easy task…” he writes in the preface.
Haydn departed from the conventions of his time, seeking not to illustrate the action but rather to build an atmosphere around the words of Christ on the cross. This was followed by a keyboard version, which Haydn did not write, but which he corrected and approved, and an oratorio. But it is the expressive power of the string quartet that best allows us to hear all the modernity of the work!
Program :
Joseph Haydn, The 7 last words of Christ
