Stenhammar Quartet

The Stenhammar Quartet is one of Scandinavia’s leading string quartets. It has toured throughout Europe and recorded a number of acclaimed albums, praised by critics in both Swedish and international press. The quartet has appeared at Konserthuset Stockholm on several previous occasions.

As part of Konserthuset’s major Beethoven focus, the quartet takes on his very last completed work, the Sixteenth String Quartet. It is as if the music bears traces of a lifetime’s accumulated experience. The graceful opening Allegretto is followed by a furious scherzo, while the slow movement unfolds as a serene meditation in variation form. The finale opens with two short motifs marked with mottos that reveal both doubt and resolve: Muss es sein? (Must it be so?) and Es muss sein! (It must be so!).

A completely different musical landscape is encountered in Sivunittinni (The Future) by the Canadian Inuit singer and composer Tanya Tagaq. Written for the Kronos Quartet, it incorporates recordings of her throat singing. “My hope is that through this piece I can offer future musicians something of my land,” says Tanya Tagaq.

After the interval, we enter a dark drama illuminated by Nordic light – and the realm in which the Stenhammar Quartet truly excels: the music of Wilhelm Stenhammar. The quartet has recorded all six of his string quartets, as well as the unnumbered Quartet in F minor. The Second String Quartet, from 1896, is an intense masterpiece in C minor and marks an important step in Stenhammar’s development as a composer of quartets. With its restless energy, echoes of Beethoven and lyrical Nordic melancholy, the music grips the listener from the very first bar.