Doric String Quartet

The string quartet subscription at Konserthuset Stockholm has a youthful influence this season, featuring quartets that have garnered great attention in recent years. The Doric String Quartet was formed in 1998 and regularly appears in the leading concert halls of Europe and the US.

The Konserthuset programme includes Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in F-major, Op. 50, often referred to as The Dream thanks to the slow, swaying, and nearly hypnotic movement. Swedish Andrea Tarrodi (born 1981) found the inspiration for her third string quartet, Light Scattering, in how light disperses through the various shapes of glass. Johanna Paulsson wrote in Dagens Nyheter that “the piece contains everything I associate with Tarrodi’s music: gorgeous melodic colours and nuances of light as well as birdsong in the cello’s so-called seagull glissando. From the creaky overtones of ringing glass in the introduction to a sacred, swirling drone sound through an interplay between something melodic, and something nearly mechanical – luminous!"

Like few others, Bartók opened his ears to the surrounding world. In the years leading up to World War I, he travelled not only around the Hungarian countryside, but also through Transylvania, Bulgaria and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where he recorded and catalogued folk songs. His interest in folk music is particularly evident in the rhythmically daring fourth string quartet, which is a cross between traces of the late-Romantic era and Expressionism, between emotion and reason.