Cuarteto Casals
Abel Tomàs, violin
Vera Martínez, violin
Jonathan Brown, viola
Arnau Tomàs, cello

Franz Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 20 No. 3, Hob:III:33

Antonín Dvořák
Cypresses for String Quartet, B 11

Felix Mendelssohn
String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 44 No. 1

Watch the video
Cuarteto Casals · Franz Schubert · Death and the Maiden (live in Barcelona)

The Cuarteto Casals was created in 1997 at the Reina Sofía School of Music in Madrid and is much-acclaimed for its "unmistakable sound signature" (New York Times). It performs in the world's leading concert venues, from the Carnegie Hall in New York to the Cité de la Musique in Paris and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

The musicians regularly perform the repertoire's greatest quartets, including the Viennese classics. A project devoted to the Beethoven quartets, spanning several years, celebrated the ensemble's 20th anniversary. The Cuarteto Casals also works intensively with today's composers, in particular with György Kurtág and leading Spanish composers such as Francisco Coll. Following up its concert in January 2020, when it presented Coll's Cantos in Lugano, the Cuarteto Casals returns to the LAC with three masterpieces of the repertoire.

The programme opens with Haydn's Third Quartet Op. 20, which initiates the development of his musical language towards a classical style. It will be followed by six "songs" from Dvořák's Cypresses cycle – an early work the composer worked upon several times during his life – and Mendelssohn's Quartet No. 3 in D major. The composer's hope was that "listening to this music will arouse the same emotions that it does for me".