The Quatuor Diotima plays Ligeti and Janáček

From the outset, it played on the great international stages such as the Auditorium du Louvre, the Cité de la Musique and the Berlin Philharmonie, and has already given guest performances in Japan, the USA, Central and South America, China and Korea: the Quatuor Diotima, which was founded in 1996 by prize-winners of the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris and is today one of the world’s leading string quartets. The name with which the formation pays tribute to Luigi Nono’s string quartet Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima, is a statement of its programme and refers to the four musicians’ strong commitment to musical Modernism. “A more competent ensemble than Quatuor Diotima can hardly be imagined for concerts of contemporary music for string quartet”, the Hamburger Abendblatt wrote. It continued: “Perfect is an inadequate word to describe the quality of their interplay”. It is no wonder that Quatuor Diotima regularly commissions works from major composers of our time, including Toshio Hosokawa, Miroslav Srnka, Mauro Lanza, Gérard Pesson, Rebecca Saunders and Tristan Murail. But “Diotima” also hints at German Romanticism: Friedrich Hölderlin gave the love of his life this very name in his novel Hyperion. The quartet also does justice to this point of reference when it brings the Classical and Romantic string quartet repertoire to life with energy and a subtle balance of colours.