Diogenes Quartet

Brief profile

The Diogenes Quartet, comprising Stefan Kirpal (violin), Gundula Kirpal (violin), Alba González i Becerra (viola) and Stephen Ristau (cello), is one of the most highly regarded German string quartets of our time and can now look back on a concert career spanning more than 25 years.

Regular tours take the Munich-based ensemble throughout Europe and to festivals as far afield as Mexico. The highlight of the 2025/26 concert season will be a tour of Spain. The Diogenes Quartet will perform a Beethoven cycle there, which will continue into the 2026/27 and 2027/28 concert seasons.

The ensemble’s wide-ranging repertoire spans works from the Classical and Romantic periods right through to the modern era. The quartet enjoys complementing the ‘traditional’ repertoire with new, lesser-known compositions from a wide variety of eras. It is thanks to this curiosity that the musicians discovered Brahms’s contemporary Friedrich Gernsheim, whose work they have been studying intensively for several years. The result of this work is a complete recording of his string quartets and quintets (cpo), which was completed in spring 2025, with the third album (of a total of four) due for release in March 2026.

The quartetʼs name honors its long-standing friendship with Rudolph C. Bettschart, the former co-owner of the Swiss publishing house Diogenes.

www.diogenes-quartett.de
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