To Be Loved

With its collection created in collaboration with the Academy of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Alpha continues to support new talents. The Esmé Quartet, consisting of four Korean women musicians, was founded in 2016 and is based in Germany. Its members have received guidance from Günter Pichler of the Alban Berg Quartett and Heime Müller of the Artemis Quartett, among others. In addition to winning the Prize of the Aix Festival Academy, they also received First Prize at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition in London. They present here a programme that combines Classical and contemporary music: Beethoven's first string quartet is joined by ParaMetaString, a quartet 'with magnetic tape' that the Kronos Quartet commissioned from the Esmé's compatriot Unsuk Chin in 1996. The Novelletten by the English composer Frank Bridge (1904) serve as a link between these two works and round off an overview of some of the finest chamber music written over the past 200 years.