Kairos Quartett

The Kairos Quartett’s very varied programme interestingly juxtaposes violin quartets by two American avant-garde musicians, a young Russian composer, the ethnic Armenian Avet Terterian and string trio by the Berlin composer Erhard Grosskopf.

Structures (1951) is the first of four violin quartets written by Morton Feldman and numbers among his early compositions based on a graphical score. It is a miniature of pointillistic musical events and patterns that are reminiscent of the works of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School.

Like Morton Feldman, Ben Johnston was born in 1926. Under the influence of John Cage and Harry Partch and striving to define his own position within the conflicting musical developments of the twentieth century, Johnston invented his own system for organising complex serial processes, microtonal counterpoint and an extended form of just intonation. We will hear the German première of Ben Johnston’s String Quartet No. 5 (1979). Johnston is one of the most versatile and interesting avant-garde composers, but he remains little known in Germany.

The ethnic Armenian composer Avet Terterian is of the same generation as Feldman and Johnston. Born in Baku in 1929, he would have celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. His work is deeply interconnected with the traditions of the Armenian people. He combined archaic sounds with progressive compositional techniques involving aleatory devices or clusters, concentrating, however, again and again on the silence following the sound – the “never-ending” sound.

Erhard Grosskopf, who celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday in March of this year, also developed a musical language of his very own. Fundamental elements of his highly original music include temporal structures generated by proportions based on numbers and harmonic constellations that are influenced by probability and chance. His work retains simplicity despite its multi-layered, rather abstract structure, appearing sensitive and poetic, and also often very exciting.

Finally, the Kairos Quartett will première the string quartet Night-turn by the young Muscovite Dmitri Kourliandski, who is currently a guest of the German Academic Exchange Service’s Artists-in-Berlin Programme and is also featured in other concerts at this year’s MaerzMusik festival.