Final concert
Bennewitz Quartet & Gerhard Quartet
Program: Joseph Haydn - Dmitri Shostakovich - Felix Mendelssohn
The renowned Bennewitz Quartet will bring the anniversary year to a festive close together with the young Spanish-based Gerhard Quartet. At the beginning, both ensembles will have the opportunity to present themselves in their original line-up. With Felix Mendelssohn's String Octet, a highly demanding and virtuoso masterpiece by the sixteen-year-old composer, they will bring the 20th Mendelssohn Music Week Wengen to a brilliant close.
The Bennewitz Quartet (Jakub Fišer & Štěpán Ježek - violin, Jiří Pinkas - viola, Štěpán Doležal - cello) is regarded as the Czech Republic's cultural ambassador on the global chamber music scene. Based in Prague, the musicians play in the string quartet Olympus due to their homogeneity and technical perfection, coupled with genuine feeling, and embody the Bohemian-Czech sound idiom. It is a regular guest at important music centers and festivals. The ensemble has been awarded several international 1st prizes. In 2004 it received the Czech Chamber Music Society Prize and in 2019 the Classic Prague Award for the best chamber music concert of the year. The members of the quartet attach great importance to an inspiring and challenging selection of concert repertoire. In 2019, Supraphon released a CD with music by the Jewish composers H. Krása, V. Ullmann, E. Schulhoff and P. Haas, all of whom fell victim to Nazi terror. The Bennewitz Quartet performed a selection of these works at the official commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust at the German Bundestag in Berlin in 2019.
The Spanish Gerhard Quartet (Lluís Castán i Cochs & Judit Bardolet i Vilaró - violins, Miquel Jordà i Saún - viola, Jesús Miralles i Roger - cello) is characterized by a remarkable sensitivity of sound and the finest differentiation in interpretation. The ensemble has won several competitions. It was recently selected for support by the European Merita Platform. It has received valuable impulses in master classes with important personalities such as György Kurtág, András Schiff and Ferenc Rados. In the String Quartet Academy in Vic (Barcelona), co-founded by the Cuarteto Casals, the Gerhard Quartet participates once a year as a teacher to convey the beauty of chamber music creation.