Described by The Strad as presenting “a masterclass in unanimity of musical purpose, in which severity could melt seamlessly into charm, and drama into geniality”, the award-winning Carducci Quartet is internationally acclaimed as one of the most accomplished and versatile ensembles of today. Not only performing the core repertoire, the quartet presents a selection of new works each season and diversifies further with programmes of film music, pop, folk and rock, as well as concerts of music and spoken word.
Founded in 1997, the ensemble was a prize winner at numerous international competitions, including the Concert Artists Guild International Competition, and Finland’s Kuhmo International Chamber Music Competition.
The Carducci Quartet regularly appears at prestigious venues across the globe including the Barbican, Cadogan Hall, Southbank Centre, Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall, London; National Concert Hall, Dublin; Tivoli Concert Hall, Copenhagen; The Frick Collection and Carnegie Hall, New York; Library of Congress and John. F Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; St Lawrence Center for the Arts, Toronto; Muziekcentrum De Bijloke, Ghent; and Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Festival residencies include Cheltenham, Ryedale, Aldeburgh, Lichfield, Presteigne, Kilkenny, Canterbury, and West Cork.
The music of Shostakovich has always been a particular point of focus for the quartet. In 2016, they took home a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for their project, Shostakovich15, an immense cycle of Shostakovich’s Quartets performed across the UK, North, and South America, with a marathon one-day cycle hosted by Shakespeare’s Globe, London. The project was accompanied by recordings of the 4th, 8th, and 11th Quartets, before the 1st, 2nd, and 7th Quartets (2019), and 9th and 15th Quartets (2024). Recent projects have included ‘Shostakovich’s Letters’ with actor Anton Lesser – a programme based around translations of texts from the composer himself alongside his music.
To find out more, see Carducci Quartet
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EXUBERANCE AND LYRICISM AT SKIPTON MUSIC
The Carducci Quartet brought Skipton Music’s 2025-26 season to a triumphant conclusion with this concert which blended exuberance and lyricism, classical and modern in a deeply satisfying and varied programme.
The quartet began and ended the concert with two very different works from the first half of the twentieth century. Rebecca Clarke was an Irish composer whose music is all too little known. The Carducci quartet brought out all the delicacy and passionate expression in this fine one-movement work – as the leader Matthew Denton said in introducing the piece it would be wonderful if she had made it into a longer work. In contrast, Shostakovich’s 2nd quartet, written in the immediate aftermath of the siege of Leningrad, starts with deceptive brilliance before turning to darker colours, and the ambiguous and shifting moods of the last movement were particularly moving in this fine performance.
In between we heard the whimsical and appealing “Entr’acte” of 2011, by the American composer Caroline Shaw, and the E flat quartet by Fanny Mendelssohn. This stunning performance, in turn deeply expressive, playful, and exuberant, confirmed my view that Fanny’s music is every bit as fine as – and even more original than – that of her more famous brother Felix. What a loss to music that she had so little encouragement to develop and publish her compositions before her tragically early death.
Charles Dobson
Click here to sign up for Listening Club! Welcome to the Skipton Music Listening Club. Each month, we choose a piece of music which is being performed in that month's Skipton Music Concert and the week before the concert, we meet online to listen and have a chat about it - hopefully with some special […]
