RELOCATED: Hagen Quartett (2G)

The Hagen Quartet is a real family business: Lukas, Veronika and Clemens Hagen are siblings. The three have been making music in the same line-up with Rainer Schmidt since 1987. Their close relationship is palpable on stage and their concert repertoire now covers practically the entire string quartet canon.

Their recent performances of all fifteen of Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets received particular acclaim. In the Laeiszhalle Recital Hall, the four musicians perform two late works by the Russian composer – Quartets No. 11 and No. 12 – in which his interest in new compositional approaches such as the twelve-tone technique is clearly to be heard.

They also perform Franz Schubert’s famous Rosamunde Quartet. Schubert composed the piece during the melancholic and musically complex late period of his chamber music oeuvre. Four years before his early death, he was already very infirm physically and mentally. His Rosamunde Quartet testifies to his engagement with the themes of transience, death and salvation. It is the only one of the composer’s string quartets to have been performed publicly during his lifetime.