Stradivari Quartett

Since its debut in the Zurich Tonhalle in September 2007, the Stradivari Quartet has made a name for itself as an ensemble of great promise and become one of the leading Swiss string quartets. Some thirty performances a year take the Stradivari Quartet to venues all over the world. Highlights include appearances at the Wigmore Hall in London, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Kioi Hall in Tokyo, the Shanghai Oriental Hall and the National Center for Performing Arts in Beijing, as well as such prestigious events as the Lucerne Festival, the Bad Kissingen Summer Festival, the Rheingau Music Festival, the Rubinstein Piano Festival in Lódz, the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and the Stradivari Festival in Cremona.
The ensemble performs a wide repertoire ranging from ground-breaking works by Joseph Haydn to contemporary compositions.
The sound ideal of the four musicians is influenced by the Alban Berg Quartet. Xiaoming Wang was a pupil of Gerhard Schulz, a long-standing member of that world-ranking quartet. Maja Weber established the Amar Quartet and brings twenty years of experience in string-quartet performance with her. Sebastian Bohren and Lech Antonio Uszynski, who were both trained in the tradition of the Russian school, complete this ensemble of four prizewinning musicians.
The Stradivari Quartet is among the few ensembles in the world performing exclusively on instruments of the famous violin maker Antonio Stradivari. Each of the four instruments has its own history and some have travelled far and wide. They are today all in the possession of the Habisreutinger Foundation and are on loan to the Stradivari Quartet.
In the near future, the Stradivari Quartet will be performing at venues like Toulouse, the Stradivari Festival in Cremona, Kings Place in London, the Rheingau Music Festival and in Lithuania. Together with the baritone Shenyang, the ensemble will perform at the major venues in China – Macau, Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin – during a two-week tour of the country. Furthermore, the ensemble will be performing with the cellists Thomas Demenga and Maximilian Hornung, the violinist Gerhard Schulz and the violist Antoine Tamestit.

The instruments

The “Aurea” violin corresponds with Stradivari’s “golden mean”, and it produces an incomparable volume of sound. Built in 1710, the precious “King George” violin even survived the battle of Waterloo intact in the saddlebag of a horse. The “Gibson” of 1734 is probably the last contralto viola the great violin maker produced. This wonderful, absolutely perfect instrument is in excellent condition after 280 years. Stradivari made the “Bonamy Dobree-Suggia” cello in 1717.