Sunday 16^th March 2025

3.00 pm

Runtime: 120 minutes

Colyer-Fergusson Hall

The Gulbenkian Arts Centre

University of Kent

 Kyan String Quartet

Naomi Warburton, violin
Sydney Mariano. violin
Wanshu Qiu, viola
Simon Gueny, cello

Programme

Franz Schubert: String Quartet No12, “Quartettsatz” in c minor, D.703

Single movement: Allegro Assai

Wolfgang Mozart: String Quartet No.15 in d minor, K.421

I.     Allegro moderato
II.    Andante (in F major)
III.   Menuet and Trio(in D major) – Allegretto
IV.    Allegretto ma non troppo – piu allegro (Variations on a theme)

Dimitri Shostakovich: String Quartet No.7 in f sharp minor, Op. 108

I.     Allegretto
II.    Lento
III.   Allegro – Allegretto

Interval

Caroline Shaw: “Entr’acte” … In the style of a Minuet and Trio

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet in e minor, Op.59 No.2, “Razumovsky”

I.     Allegro
II.    Molto Adagio
III.   Allegretto – Maggiore (Theme Russe)
IV.    Finale, Presto

Biography

Prize winners of the 2024 Royal Over-Seas League competition and 2025 City Music Foundation artists, the award winning Kyan Quartet brings together four exceptional musicians from the United Kingdom, the United States, China, and France. Established in 2020, the quartet enjoys a busy and vibrant career, having performed across Europe and Asia in venues including Wigmore Hall, St. Martin in the Fields, Beethoven-Haus Chamber Music Hall, Shanghai Opera House and Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra Hall.

As Tunnell Trust award holders, the quartet enjoyed touring across Scotland this February. They are looking forward to joining the Carducci Quartet in their Barbican Shostakovich cycle project, with three performances spanning March to May at Milton Court. Other upcoming highlights include debuts at St. John Smith Square, Barnes Music Society and Canterbury Music Club. Continuing their ongoing collaboration with Ahmed Dickinson, the Kyans will return to Conway Hall this November for a programme of guitar quintets. The Quartet are grateful to be supported by Le Dimore del Quartetto.

The Kyans have held residencies with the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme and the South Downs Summer Music International Festival, and won places on prestigious courses, including the International Beethoven Masterclass in Bonn, Jeunesses Musicales Deutschland’s 68th International Chamber Music Campus and Chamber Studio’s inaugural Hans Keller Forum. Through these they have received coaching from all members of the Belcea Quartet, Heime Müller, John Myerscough, Jana Kuss, Alasdair Beatson and Péter Nagy. The quartet has also been coached by members of the Carducci, Doric, Heath, Jerusalem and Pavel Haas Quartets. They are currently being mentored at the Mozarteum University by Cibrán Sierra Vazquez, Rainer Schmidt and William Coleman.

Widening musical participation and access is central to the Quartet’s artistic mission. They are Live Music Now artists, sharing their love of participatory music-making in care homes and SEND schools. The quartet give masterclasses and work with young composers at the Junior Royal Academy of Music. As the 2022/23 fellows of the Open Academy/Wigmore Hall Learning Programme, they appeared regularly on the Wigmore Hall stage and in community settings, sharing music with families, young children, and those living with dementia. A particular highlight was leading workshops across six primary schools in Tower Hamlets, in partnership with Spitalfields Music.

The Kyan Quartet pride themselves on championing new music. They have given Wigmore premieres of commissioned pieces by Florence Anna Maunders and Zhenyan Li, and performed “Symphony for String Quartet and Forest” by Jacob Fitzgerald at the 2022 Timber Festival, featuring 200 school children singing alongside the Quartet. The Kyans collaborated with Cem Güven to record his 2023 quartet “Atmospheric Manipulations” and will feature on Ben Nobuto’s upcoming debut album.

Programme Notes

FRANZ SCHUBERT
Born 1797 and Died 1828, Vienna
Franz Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. During his short life Schubert composed a vast body of work which included much chamber music - many string quartets, quintets, trios and duos – in addition to thirteen orchestral symphonies, overtures, twenty operas, incidental music, piano pieces, part songs, masses and most notably over six hundred Lieder for solo voice and piano.

Schubert’s Quartettsatz No 12 in C minor, D703 was composed in December 1820 as the first movement, Allegro assai, of a string quartet he was never to complete. This sophisticated composition remained unknown and probably unperformed in Schubert’s short lifetime but today is recognized as an important bridge to his more esteemed mature style demonstrated in his three final quartets (the “Rosamunde” and “Death and the Maiden” of 1824, and the G major Quartet of 1826). The Quartettsatz opens with a fiery storm but soon subsides into an ethereally beautiful second theme and this contrast of expressive ideas becomes the central feature of the piece.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
Born Salzburg, 1756 Died Vienna, 1791
Mozart was a child prodigy and is esteemed as one of the greatest and most influential composers in the history of Western music. His father, Leopold Mozart, took Wolfgang and his sister “Nannerl” as children on extended performing tours around Europe to show off their extraordinary musical talents. At seventeen Mozart was engaged as a Court Musician in Salzburg but also visited many of the Capital cities in Europe and, in 1781, Vienna where he chose to stay for the remainder of his very short life.

Two of Mozart’s most notable musical influences were CPE Bach and Joseph Haydn. The quartet we are to hear today is the second of his set of six quartets dedicated to Haydn and the only one in a minor key. It is believed to have been completed in June 1783 and the set was published in Vienna in 1785 as his Op.10. In four movements with an innovative cyclic form, it is maybe most memorable for the rising thirds motif in the menuet part of the third movement said to represent the birth of Mozart’s first son, Raimund, in the next room, followed by a light-hearted trio in a contrasting major mode, and the Tierce de Picardie “happy ending” of the final Theme and Variations movement, in which motifs from earlier movements are reexplored.

DIMITRI SCHOSTAKOVICH
Born 1906, St Petersburg Died 1975, Moscow
Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who, despite being a “star pupil” when studying at the Leningrad Conservatory, later found his music being condemned by the Stalinist Soviet regime for being “bourgeois”, “vulgar” and “anti-people”. During this time he was obliged to write scores for pro-Stalin films in order to support his family and felt very keenly the painful dilemmas of living and working in a totalitarian state. Internationally Shostakovich was renowned particularly for his fifteen symphonies, numerous chamber works and concerti, many of them written under the pressures of government imposed standards of Soviet art.
Shostakovich combined a variety of different musical techniques in his works. His music characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque and ambivalent tonality, is however also influenced by Neoclassicism and by the Late Romanticism of Gustav Mahler.

The String Quartet we are to hear today was composed in memory of Shostakovich’s first wife, Nina, and was completed and premiered in Leningrad in 1960 – the year that would have marked her 50th birthday. It is Shostakovich’s shortest quartet (just 13 minutes) and although it has 4 movements, the last is not considered separate from the third. Together the third movement comprises an Allegro (Fugue) – Allegretto(waltz) performed “attacca”, as indeed is the whole work. The quartet ends with a ‘cello pizzicato passage leading up to an F#MAJOR triad!

Interval

CAROLINE SHAW
Born 1982, North Carolina USA
Caroline Shaw is an American violinist, singer and composer of contemporary classical music who, although best known for her vocal and choral works has also composed chamber, orchestral, multimedia, solo instrumental music and film scores. Shaw is a musician who moves among many roles, genres and mediums, “trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed”. Working often in collaboration with others as producer, composer, violinist and vocalist, Shaw is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in music, several Grammys and an honorary doctorate from Yale. This season (2024/25) she is Composer in Residence at the Wigmore Hall in London.

“Entr’acte” was written in 2011 after hearing the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Opus 77 No2 (with soulful shift to the D flat major trio section in the minuet!) Entr’acte is structured like a minuet and trio, riffing on that classical form but taking it a little further. Shaw says, “I love the way that some music (like the minuet of Haydn’s Opus 77) suddenly takes you to the other side of Alice’s Looking Glass in a kind of absurd, subtle, technicolour transition”.

LUDVIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Born 1770, Bonn Died 1827, Vienna
Beethoven was born into a musical family, both his grandfather and father being musicians in the service of the Elector of Bonn. As a young man he studied in Vienna with Mozart, Haydn and Albrechtsberger and went on to reside in Vienna supported by a body of aristocratic music lovers who valued his skill as a pianist and his already evident genius as a composer. Often described as “The Shakespeare of Music”, Beethoven went on to stand supreme as a composer despite the onset of his progressive deafness in his thirties.

Beethoven’s Quartet No 8 in e minor, Opus 59, no 2 is the second of the set of three quartets commissioned by and dedicated to Count Razumovsky, Russian Ambassador at Vienna, and a keen quartet player. Razumovsky’s only specific request was that Russian folk tunes be significantly featured in the music. “Each of the Op.59 quartets stands as a monumental individual work, both in terms of literal size and dramatic scope” Kurt Baldwin. In the quartet we are to hear today this drama is evident from the outset as the first movement opens with two declamatory chords (tonic and dominant) followed by a bar of silence and then covers a huge emotional range moving through a complex myriad of harmonic sequences in the development section after an energetic opening. As a contrast, the second movement is an ethereal Adagio in E major which according to Czerny, a friend and student of Beethoven, “occurred to him when contemplating the starry sky and thinking of the music of the spheres”. The third, scherzo movement is a much-used Russian theme as requested but in an unusually skittish way with an almost amusing harmonic clash. The final movement, described by Robert Simpson as “wildly Slavic” plays with a repeating harmonic “game” between C major and the main key of e minor.

Tickets from

Gulbenkian Box Office

Live Attendance: £25

25s and under: FREE