Celebrating its 50th anniversary this season, the Arditti Quartet will open the 2024 edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival – hcmf // 2024 – on Friday 15 November, despite recent injury setbacks
Celebrating its 50th anniversary this season, the Arditti Quartet will open the 2024 edition of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival – hcmf // 2024 – on Friday 15 November.
Earlier in the month, the ensemble had to postpone some engagements in Vienna after cellist Lucas Fels dislocated his arm. The Arditti Quartet’s website reports that he ‘is well on his way to recovery and will be playing again by the new year’. Meanwhile, the show goes on in Huddersfield, with French cellist Pierre Strauch filling in.
Just four years older than hcmf, Arditti Quartet enjoys a longstanding relationship with this festival devoted to contemporary music and has made regular appearances there since first performing at Huddersfield in 1982.
The match seems almost pre-destined, for the Arditti Quartet has for decades been an influential protagonist in the sphere of contemporary music. Violinist Irvine Arditti, who founded the ensemble in 1974 while part of the London Symphony Orchestra (of which he became co-concertmaster), describes the undertaking as initially ‘just a hobby.’
The Arditti Quartet has commissioned hundreds of new works, working closely with leading composers of the era – Kaija Saariaho, Wolfgang Rihm, György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis among them. A prolific and multiple award-winning discography of more than 200 recordings documents this work.
‘Open-eared, tireless and brilliant, few ensembles can be said to have shaped the music of their time so definitively’, as the musicologist Tim Rutherford-Johnson writes. ‘Simply by enabling composers to pursue their wildest imaginings, the ensemble … has transformed the possibilities of music for string quartet, and indeed our definitions of what a string quartet even is or can be.’
Arditti emphasises the significance of this year’s return to hcmf, where the Arditti Quartet will set the tone for the entire festival with its opening-night performance. ‘Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival stands out as being the only UK festival that has supported us over such a long period,’ he says. ‘We started with Xenakis in 1982 and return this year to play music where the ink is still wet – a 50th-birthday tribute that shows we continue the way we started, creating new works.’
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