Season Preview: Quartetto di Cremona

Quartetto di Cremona is admired as a preeminent quartet of its generation, noted for its lustrous sound, refined musicianship, and stylistic versatility. Since its founding in 2000 at the Accademia Walter Stauffer in Cremona, the Quartet has toured extensively in Europe, the United States, South America, and Asia, appeared at leading festivals, and performed regularly on radio and television broadcasts, including RAI, BBC, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Quartetto di Cremona’s extensive repertoire encompasses key masterworks—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert—and essential twentieth-century literature by Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Shostakovich, and Mauricio Kagel.

After last season’s debut performance at the Frick Collection in New York and a major tour throughout Europe—Milan, Verona, Florence, Rome, Genoa, Bergamo, Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Leiden, Geneva, Zurich, and Valencia, in the 2019-2020 season, Quartetto di Cremona embarks on a ten cities-North America tour, appearing at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Wallis Annenberg Center, Music Toronto, Parlance Chamber Concerts, Houston da Camera, Dumbarton Concerts, Boise Chamber Music Series, American Music Festival and Chamber Music Wilmington.

In July 2018, the German label Audite issued the box set of Quartetto di Cremona’s complete cycle of the Beethoven quartets, recorded during the period 2013-2016, which includes the String Quintet in C major, Op. 29 with Lawrence Dutton, violist of the Emerson String Quartet. The box set received widespread and immediate recognition, including a five-star rating in BBC Music Magazine, the International Classical Music Awards 2018, the Echo Klassik 2017 prize, Supersonic Award from the German magazine Pizzicato and selection as album of the month by the German Journal Fonoforum. The Quartet’s latest all-Schubert album featuring Death and the Maiden and String Quintet in C major with cellist Eckart Runge, released by Audite in May 2019, was recorded on Stradivarius’s Paganini Quartet, one of the few quartet "sets" completed by Antonio Stradivari and once owned by the legendary violinist Niccolò Paganini. Eckart Runge plays a rare cello made by Hieronymus and Antonio Amati in their Cremonese atelier.

One of the earliest recipients of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, Quartetto di Cremona is supported by the Kulturfond Peter Eckes. Awarded with the BBT Fellowship in 2005, the Quartetto di Cremona is the recipient of the second “Franco Buitoni Award” (2019), in recognition of their contribution in promoting and encouraging chamber music in Italy and throughout the world.

In 2015, the musicians were awarded honorary citizenship by the city of Cremona. The Quartet resides in Genoa.

“This is the most exciting new disc of string quartet playing that I have come across for a long time…Altogether a revelation.” — BBC Music Magazine

“The Cremona Quartet completes its Beethoven series with a fine coupling, combining exemplary technique and intonational purity with an interpretive acuity that strips away 19th-century rhetoric while avoiding the pitfalls of sounding merely ‘historically informed’.” — The Strad

2019-2020 North American Tour

Oct. 12
Beverley Hills, CA
Wallis Annenberg Center

Oct. 17
Toronto
Jane Mallett Theatre

Oct. 19
Washington D.C.
Dumbarton Church

Oct. 21-22
Houston
The Menil Collection

Oct. 24
Costa Mesa, CA
Samueli Theater

Oct. 25
Boise, ID
Morrison Center

Oct. 27
Ridgewood, NJ
Parlance Chamber Concerts

Nov. 1
New York, NY
TBA

Nov. 2
Morehead City, NC
First Presbyterian Church

Nov. 3
Wilmington, NC
Beckwith Recital Hall