BQ

The BeethovenQuartett was founded in 2006 in Beethoven's birthplace in Bonn and now has its headquarters in Basel. The musicians founded this quartet relating to a great past. Therefore, they wanted to name themselves after it: BeethovenQuartett, because Beethoven is the spiritual center of the quartet play and chamber music in general.
The BeethovenQuartett does not only open up to modernism but will also stimulate and animate to new musical experiments and thinking figures. The quartet shows its style through a concentrated and thematized yearly program: of course in Switzerland, where it is now domiciled and in the rest of Europe and Asia. So the quartet played in 2012, in addition to works by Beethoven, the first performance of the string quartet "Madrigaux" (2012) of the Basler composer Jean-Jacques Dünki in several concerts in China, and for the first time in the Kiev Philharmonic and the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory together with pianist Alexei Lubimov. The Swiss cultural foundation prohelvetia enabled commissioned works by Pavel Karmanov, Alfred Zimmerlin and Jost Meier to the quartet.
In addition to the classical and romantic literature, the quartet acquired works by Swiss composers that are forgotten today for their festival "Hidden beauty" the Sound Idyll Switzerland. Such as the string quartets by Hermann Suter (1870-1926), which document various stations of his musical consciousness and thus reveal much of his artistic personality like his spiritual world through the first two decades after the turn of the century. (Published in 2014 at Musiques Suisse MGB 6279). Or Friedrich Theodor Fröhlich (1803-1836), who spent four years in Berlin during his years of study and collected formative impression through the very vivid music life of the large city during this time. He received composition lessons from none other than Carl Friedrich Zelter, the longtime head of the Sing-Akademie, founder of the Berliner Liedertafel and teacher Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. (Published in 2015 by Musiques Suisse MGB 6285).
2015/16 sees the premiere of a collaboration with musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The quartet expands its repertoire for a concert of the Society for Chamber Music in Basel with works by Louis Spohr, Richard Strauss, and Max Bruch.

...The BeethovenQuartett offers profound, poetic in-depth interpretations...
The recording technique is pleasantly open and undisguised, the booklet is comprehensively informative and...
altogether convincing.
klassik.com April 2014

"...in chamber music perfect harmony."
ensemble 02/14

...The way that the four musicians savor the cantabile of the final Adagio introduction, and thus generate a beguiling sweetness of sound makes people sit up.
Walter Labhardt; Musik&Theater 3/14