As part of the Rising Stars programme launched by the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) in 1995, the concert halls that make up the organisation each year send out a new crop of talented young musicians and ensembles on a European concert tour that, for some years now, has given the Müpa Budapest audience the chance to get to know them.
The ARD International Music Competition run by German public radio has for more than 60 years been one of the most prestigious contests in the world: whoever wins it can count on certain success, as was the case with victors like Jessye Norman, Francisco Araiza, Mitsuko Uchida, Thomas Quasthoff, Yuri Bashmet and Christian Tetzlaff. In addition to winning the overall contest in 2012, the Armida Quartet also took home six special prizes and the audience prize, an enormous success that today eclipses their triumph at the no-less prestigious Geneva Competition a year earlier.
The four young musicians formed the quartet in 2006, borrowing their name from an opera by Joseph Haydn, the father of the string quartet. They received intellectual supplies for their journey from the greatest of the great, including Alfred Brendel, Tabea Zimmermann, as well as the Alban Berg, Guarneri, Arditti and Artemis quartets, all of whom spent time and energy on them and helped them integrate into the noble tradition of European chamber music. While even with their first album they aimed for the sky by recording pieces by composers - Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág - who wrote the most difficult works in the repertoire, the sublimity of The Art of the Fugue also makes it, by different criteria, one of the most delicate undertakings in chamber music. The Mendelssohn quartet, written in the same key as Beethoven's Serioso string quartet, is the composer's final large-scale composition, originating from two months before his death and written in memory of his older sister, who had died a few weeks earlier, hence its subtitle: Requiem für Fanny. In addition to the two classical pieces, the quartet will also play a new work by the Serb composer Marko Nikodijević, who, born in 1980, is the creator of an exciting musical world through his combination of fractal and spectral music with traditional instruments, pop and techno.

Nominated for the Rising Stars programme by: Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, Konzerthaus Dortmund, Elbphilharmonie & Laeiszhalle Hamburg, Kölner Philharmonie

Presented by: Mupa Budapest