Noreia String Quartet

An evening of reflection at the Domenig Steinhaus: the four young string players of the Noreia String Quartet present works composed under the immediate and personal impression of war, state-induced terror and social exclusion.

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his most famous, but also most sombre string quartet in 1960, during the filming of the movie Five Days and Five Nights, which focused on the destruction of Dresden during World War II. The dedication of the work to all victims of war and fascism, however, seems to have been forced by the Soviet leadership – for the composer himself, it was more of an autobiographical examination of his own creative work under decades of regime repression. The priest Komitas Vardapet is considered the founder of Armenian classical art music. He narrowly escaped the Armenian genocide organised by the Ottoman Empire and died after spending more than ten years in a psychiatric hospital near Paris. In his Armenian Miniatures, he incorporated numerous folk songs and dances collected during his travels throughout the country, while American composer Jessie Montgomery’s quartet Source Code is based on works by African American artists who were active in the heated atmosphere of the 1950s and ’60s, when the struggle for civil rights divided American society.