New Zealand String Quartet celebrates 25th anniversary with Beethoven cycle

A great musical party is planned for 2012 – the New Zealand String Quartet’s 25th anniversary celebration, called BEETHOVEN! The Complete String Quartets.

Next year New Zealand’s favourite chamber musicians will be travelling around New Zealand to share Beethoven’s complete set of String Quartets in six wonderful programmes around thirteen centres in twenty-seven concerts. Audiences are invited to join the party and in some cases to travel to take in the whole cycle.

Festivities begin with two concerts in the New Zealand International Arts Festival in Wellington at the end of February. These will be an exclusive presentation of the first pair of BEETHOVEN! concerts, called The Age of Enlightenment. Chamber Music New Zealand will take the Quartet on the road in April and May for ten concerts of the composer’s middle period quartets, two programmes called Revolution and the cycle will be completed in August and September with twelve concerts of The Late Quartets.

Beethoven wrote string quartets throughout his life, some of the most remarkable chamber music ever composed. The New Zealand String Quartet will share their passion for what they describe as “monumental music expressing the full gamut of human experience”.

“Hearing the complete cycle” says cellist Rolf Gjelsten “allows the listener to follow Beethoven's development from the daring and virtuosity of his earlier works through the heroic expression of the middle period to the total mastery and profound story telling of the late quartets.”

The BEETHOVEN! cycle is a partnership project between the New Zealand String Quartet and Chamber Music New Zealand, in association with the NZ International Arts Festival.