Velvet Quartet

Ezgi Su Apaydin, violin
Laura Muskare, violin
Patricia Gómez Carretero, viola
Anastasia Averianova, cello

“Give me your hand, sweet and beautiful creature! I am your friend, you have nothing to fear. Let yourself go! Don’t be afraid… Come gently to sleep in my arms!” These are the words with which Death calls the terrified girl in the famous lied Der Tod und Das Mädchen. After the voice, Schubert entrusts the painting of this fragile moment between life and death, between anguish and disappearance, to the quartet. The sense of urgency of the first movement, the infernal tarantella of the final presto, in which the Alder King appears briefly, is opposed to the reassuring song of Death, repeated five times until we are drawn into his frozen world. It is said that Mozart wrote his quartet K.421 at another turning point, on the night Constance gave birth to their first child. As one of six quartets dedicated to Haydn, which cost the usually fast-writing Mozart an unusual amount of time, it is one of the darkest in the catalogue. Between nothingness and light, it is a concert on the edge that the Velvet Quartet, formed in 2020 but already winner of the 1st prize of the Köhler-Osbahr Competition and 3rd prize of the international Zukunftsklang Award, has chosen to offer us in partnership with the Bordeaux Bar Association.