Upper Austrian Abbey Concerts: Varian Fry Quartet

Varian Fry Quartet

Philipp Bohnen violin
Christoph von der Nahmer violin
Martin von der Nahmer Viola
Knut Weber Violoncello

Franz Schubert
Quartet movement in C minor, D 703

Claude Debussy
String Quartet in G minor, op. 10

- Intermission -

Johannes Brahms
String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, op. 51

The young generation of the Berliner Philharmoniker very consciously cultivates the Philharmoniker tradition of engaging in chamber music alongside orchestral playing. For this reason, four musicians founded the Varian Fry Quartet in the 2012/13 season, named after the American journalist and freedom fighter Varian Fry during the Second World War. The four men laid the foundations in 2007, when they first came together as young academy students of the Berliner Philharmoniker to play in a quartet. Since then, the supreme discipline of chamber music has never let them go.

In keeping with their career, the quartet chose Claude Debussy for their debut at the OÖ. Stiftskonzerte, the quartet chose Claude Debussy's only string quartet from 1892, which was composed in the immediate vicinity of Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune. The two pieces are seen as the conclusion of Debussy's youthful work and as the 30-year-old composer's first masterpieces. The Berliner Philharmoniker will follow the classical-romantic string quartet with the famous Second String Quartet op. 51, which Johannes Brahms wrote with much pain and suffering in the summer of 1873 and performed for the first time on October 18 at the Berlin Singakademie.