With its new program STRUCTURE AND FREEDOM, the Rothko String Quartet brings baroque, classical and contemporary styles together with US-American and German perspectives on the string quartet genre. While the fugues of Bach and Beethoven are highlights of strict counterpoint, Florence Price transfers this compositional principle into a romantic sound aesthetic and combines it closely with American spirituals. Sky Macklay condenses counterpoint to its smallest component, the cadence, and builds a completely new, complicated but enchantingly beautiful world from this formal cell, at the same time taking its own laws ad absurdum and breaking them in search of the limits of the string quartet. In the music of the composer inti figgis-vizueta, who has close ties to the Rothko Quartet, collaboration and coexistence are explored in a new way. In the contrasts of the styles assembled in this program lies an intermediate space that symbolizes the search for community, communication, empathy and contemporaneity, raising the question: what is our future and why is a string quartet sitting there?

Music:

inti figgis-vizueta: mayu (the great river)
Sky Macklay: Many, Many Cadences
Florence Price: Five Folksongs in Counterpoint, V.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Kunst der Fuge, XIX. 
inti figgis-vizueta: Talamh (land)
Ludwig van Beethoven: Große Fuge

Program duration: approx. 65 mins. without intermission

Short Bio:

The Rothko String Quartet (RSQ), consisting of Marc Kopitzki (Viola), Jakob Nierenz (Cello), Joosten Ellée (Violin) and William Overcash (Violin), was founded in Lueneburg, Germany in 2017. The latter two specialized in the study of both early and contemporary music, which gives the ensemble a high degree of flexibility in dealing with different styles of classical music, enabling a wide variety of concert programs. Embodying this stylistic diversity, the RSQ sees it as its task to give a voice to the music of marginalized composers and to bring lesser-known works of classical music history to light.

The collaborative spirit of the four musicians characterizes not only their collaboration with contemporary composers and artists from different disciplines, but also their attitude towards each other in rehearsals. In addition to performing newly composed music, the RSQ is interested in dissolving the boundaries between (musical) genres and works with producers, composers, improvisers and visual artists. Important partners include Mirna Bogdanovic and the Holon Trio (jazz), Sadie Weis (visual arts) and dOP (techno).

Together with its partner PODIUM Esslingen, the RSQ develops exciting concert programs that are performed at major classical music festivals. The quartet regularly performs at the Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, the Duesseldorf Festival! and the PODIUM Festival Esslingen and will make its debut at the Schleswig-Holstein Musikfestival, the Thueringer Bachwochen and the Mozartfest Wuerzburg in 2024.