Cuarteto Quiroga | UKARIA Cultural Centre

The 'exquisite' and 'interpretatively fresh' (New York Times) Cuarteto Quiroga celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2023 and now makes its UKARIA debut. The quartet has become a staple of the European and North American chamber music landscape and is renowned for its distinctive musical personality and charismatic music-making.

This concert, featuring three markedly different string quartets, showcases the genre as a source of compositional inspiration, from Austria to Argentina. Mozart's String Quartet No. 16 in E flat, K. 428, sees a brilliant young voice paying homage to his friend and mentor Haydn, in a work that mixes harmonic adventures in chromaticism with agile humour and frank expression. Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera's first string quartet presents a shocking contrast: composed in 1948 at an artistic turning point in Ginastera's career, the quartet erupts into being with a first movement allegro violento ed agitator, its ferocity and folk rhythms nodding to both Bartók's influence and Argentinian musical traditions. The program ends with Brahms' revered String Quartet in A minor, Op. 51 – a chance to hear one of the great string quartets interpreted by one of the great string quartets at work today.