ZehetmairQuartet

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String Quartet
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Press

  • Edinburgh Festival

    Queens' Hall
    Aug 2017

    • The Zehetmair Quartet gave one of the International Festival’s freshest, most bracing recitals so far, with each musical gesture – and there were plenty of flamboyant ones – seeming to come from an inner impulse, as though the music simply had to be like that.

      • The Scotsman
      • 28 August 2015

    • The Zehetmair Quartet often performs from memory — the players learn their parts by heart before they even start to rehearse, and tend to unleash thrilling levels of musical insight and expressive freedom accordingly. There were music stands on stage at this Queen’s Hall morning recital, but the capacity to react to each other and take the music in new directions was there from note one. The quartet’s leader is the Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair, until last year music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia and a superb all-round musician, simultaneously assertive and attentive, acutely detailed and instinctive.

  • Edinburgh International Festival

    Aug 2021

    • ...they gave the impression that they had been living with this music for as long a time as Brahms took to produce it, with sensitive, nuanced readings that seemed to come from the heart... It was in the slow movement that they really came into their own, though, the mahogany tone of the strings forming a melting contrast to their surroundings as the gently repeating phrases rose upwards in the manner of a prayer. This was a pair of towering performances.

  • London recital

    Wigmore Hall
    Mar 2014

    • The Zehetmairs came at it [Kreuzer Sonata] from a different angle, ultimately striking a finer balance between soulfulness and detachment...With Debussy's Quartet in G, too, the results of the players' experimentation were almost unfailingly positive, capturing the subtle shifts of light in the shimmering textures. The slow movement was a complete and wonderful work in itself.

  • Schumann

    recording

    • ...the Zehetmair Quartet’s new coupling focuses the music’s alternating wildness and fragility with altogether unique perception. Theirs is an agitated, combustible and loving view of Schumann, a credible trip into his troubled world that reflects older playing styles not by exaggerating or abandoning vibrato but by constantly varying tone, tempo, bow pressure and modes of attack...they are profoundly beautiful in their truthful appropriation of music that can be both poignant and aggressive.

  • Bartok

    Recording

    • Zehetmair leads his wonderfully responsive string quartet through two quartets composed between the two world wars. Bartók’s Fifth from 1934 receives a surprisingly relaxed performance… But the real surprise is Hindemith’s much less familiar Fourth Quartet. Composed in 1921, it’s hardly ever heard, but Zehetmair and his colleagues show that it deserves a place among the finest of 20th-century works for the medium. … There’s a real rigour and intensity about it that are compelling.

  • Recital

    Queen Eizabeth Hall, London
    Mar 2004

    • The result is a sequence of studies in musical intimacy. The dynamic range in everything the Zehetmair play is huge, surely wider than that of any other contemporary quartet; big, meaty fortissimos are interleaved with the most extraordinary pianissimo playing in which the sound is pared down to the thinnest wisps. The effect is to draw the audience even further into the performance, focusing concentration still more tightly and to giving even the tiniest gesture huge significance