DSCH & beyond (Shostakovich-Cycle)

Holzhausen Concerts // Eliot Quartet

Holzhausen Concerts // Eliot Quartet

brief information

To mark the 50th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s death (August 9th 2025), the Eliot Quartet will perform an extraordinary series of concerts in cooperation with the Frankfurter Bürgerstiftung in the Holzhausenschlösschen. The performances will also celebrate the Frankfurt ensemble’s tenth anniversary. The twelve-part concert series starts on February 8th 2024.

In the summer of 1938, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his first string quartet in just a few weeks, believing that “nothing would come of it”. According to him, the quartet remains “one of the most difficult musical genres”. Nevertheless, this modest, almost 16-minute piece was the starting point of a series of 15 string quartets that can be viewed as a kind of overview of Shostakovich’s work, whose stylistic, tonal and expressive versatility continues to fascinate today.

In the run-up to the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death on August 9th 2025, the Eliot Quartet has chosen to focus on this important chapter of chamber music in the composer’s life, exploring it in more detail than ever before. In collaboration with the Frankfurter Bürgerstiftung, and the main sponsor Ernst Max von Grunelius Foundation, the ensemble will perform all of Shostakovich’s string quartets in the Holzhausenschlösschen between February 2024 and July 2025.

What makes these concerts special is the fact that the chamber works won’t be performed in one go, but will be spread across twelve programs and carefully juxtaposed with selected pieces by other composers from Johann Sebastian Bach to Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert to Sofia Gubaidulina and Avo Pärt. In this way, the Eliot Quartet (as the title of the cycle “DSCH & beyond” suggests) consciously goes beyond Shostakovich, sometimes even distancing themselves from him entirely, in order to then approach him even more intensively. The audience is shown connections that would otherwise remain hidden – a concept that is unparalleled internationally in its extensive and allusion-rich system. In order to make the audience aware of this artistic intention before the first note, the quartet will give a short introduction to each concert.

The cycle begins with a double-bill with the first concert on February 8th and a reading by the composer and Shostakovich’s friend Krzysztof Meyer on February 9th.

The Eliot Quartet has had a close relationship with the Frankfurt Community Foundation for many years and is well-known in its hometown. Maryana Osipova and Alexander Sachs (both violin), Dmitry Hahalin (viola) and Michael Preuss (cello) have been performing together since 2014 and were the first “Resident String Quartet” in the Holzhausenschlösschen in 2019, where several concerts took place via live-stream during the pandemic. Further performances have taken the ensemble to the Schubertiade Hohenems, the Styriarte Graz, the Stuttgart Music Festival, the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Festival and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, among others. In 2022, the quartet held its “Eliots am Main” Festival in the historic Festival Hall in Frankfurt and, in Autumn 2023, it completed a tour of Canada.

 

Website DSCH & beyond (in German)

www.eliotquartett.com

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Contact

Contact persons

Bettina Schimmer Friederike Eckhardt
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DSCH & beyond