The Marmen Quartet – R/Evolution - R/evolution

With the courage, vitality and intensity of its performances, the Marmen Quartet is fast establishing itself as one of the most impressive and engaging talents in chamber music. The group has performed at prestigious venues, including Wigmore Hall and Berlin Philharmonie, and festival engagements have taken it to the Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale and BBC Proms, among others. In 2023, the Quartet completed its time as Peak Fellowship Ensemble-in-Residence at the Meadows School of the Arts in Dallas, returning in the 2023/24 season for a tour of the US and Canada.

Johannes Marmen, leader of the Quartet, explains the thinking behind their programme:

The string quartet genre, as established by Joseph Haydn, has undoubtedly been the vessel for the greatest masterpieces of many composers. The notion that this is where they can unleash their fullest expressive formidability has yielded inspired results, yet composers have handled the mighty presence of past masters very differently. How to define one’s own voice in the wake of all that tradition? One-upmanship, reverence, rebellion, homage – the paths are many.

If Haydn established the string quartet as a genre, then Mozart cemented it as a form of high artistic ambition. He clearly identified and was inspired by the extraordinary level in Haydn’s work when he composed a set of six quartets dedicated to his older colleague and friend (of which K.428 is a part).

Beethoven had a less reverent view of Papa Haydn. His first set of string quartets, Op.18, was a clear step forward compared to Haydn, almost deliberately so, like a triumphant statement of progress: more expressive, more extreme, more difficult and virtuosic.

Labelled ‘impressionists’ against their will, there are unmistakably French qualities to the musical languages of Debussy and Ravel. One may not think there is much kinship between them and Haydn, but Debussy especially uses structural and large scale harmonic devices taken right out of the playbook of the Austro-German music tradition. Ravel followed suit but in a leaner, more minimalist style, with added influences from the music of the far east.

Driven by a rigorous ethnomusicological interest, Bartók’s use of traditional music in his writing isn’t ‘added’ but rather inseparably intertwined. We hear his first and third quartet – the latter in particular constructed out of an intricate web of age old classical counterpoint techniques and even older local folk music influences. The marriage of the two results in a music not new, not old, but timeless.