Sapporo Concert Kitara

Pre-concert talk (14:45 – 14:55)

Jun Chiba (musicology, President of Sapporo Otani University) will explain the program. Don’t miss out on this opportunity.

Message from Quatuor Danel

It’s a moment where we always wait for and cherish in our planning, as Japan is a heaven for classical music.

Our relation with Japan is a long lasting love story with Kitara concert Hall in Sapporo, where we came for the first time 18 years ago, in 2005.

The little anecdote behind our first visit to Japan is that I got a very big knee injury playing football the month before and that I had to do all the tour in a wheel chair.

We were so impressed not only by the quality of the public and the acoustic of the hall, but also by the way the staff of Kitara took us like “their” quartet, some of them even accompanying us to the other concerts of the Japanese tour.

I remember having said in this time “we feel like being the Sapporo string quartet,” and this feeling grew over the years. Everytime we come we feel happy and every time we leave we feel sad, like in a family. And Kitara is in our hearts forever.

We are so happy that the tour includes Acros in Fukuoka, where we have also numerous beautiful memories, our return to the legendary Suntory Hall and to the civic center in Musashino, where programs are so adventurous. We were so happy during the last tour to discover Biwako Hall in Shiga and to come back to this amazing place, and Yokohama will be a discovery for us.

Russian music has always been special to our hearts since the time of our study, where our main mentors were the Amadeus and Borodin quartets, and where we did the first of our 34 complete cycles of Shostakovich quartets.

We recorded all Shostakovich twice, all Weinberg, all Tchaikovsky and recently all Prokofiev.

For this program, we will focus on the 20th century, celebrating the two iconic Prokofiev and Shostakovich, who, despite the great differences of their music and not very compatible characters, had a real dialogue.

The 6th quartet of Weinberg is a lesser known masterpiece of a lesser known genius of the 20th century, who to our minds is equally one of the big geniuses of the century.

His 6th quartet was written at the age of 26, just before a very tragic and difficult moment of his life, and it had been a “forbidden piece”.

It wasn’t played until we had the privilege to premiere it in 2006, sixty years after it was written.

It is a large, symphonic, epic, adventurous and extreme quartet in six movements, by a still very young man who feels there is no boundaries of any sort to what he can write.