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Arditti Quartet

75th Anniversary Celebration Event

SUNDAY CONCERTS

Music Room

Tickets are $30, $15 for members and students with ID; museum admission for that day is included. Advance reservations are strongly recommended; reserve online until 12 hours before each concert. 

Members: please sign-in to receive member discount, which will be applied at checkout

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World-renowned for its championing of new music, the formidable Arditti Quartet—selected by guest curator Nico Muhly—makes its Phillips debut performance with an all-French program.

Artist Image

Arditti Quartet

Program

75th Anniversary Celebration Event

World-renowned for its championing of new music, the formidable Arditti Quartet makes its Phillips debut performance. Since its founding in 1974, the ensemble has won numerous awards, most notably the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 1999 for lifetime achievement—a prize sometimes known as “the Nobel Prize of music,” and the Arditti Quartet is the only group to have received it.
 
Program
 
Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013)
Ainsi la Nuit
 
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
String Quartet in F Major (1903)
 
Pascal Dusapin (1955-present)
Quatour V (2004–2005) | Washington Premiere 

About the Artists

Irvine Arditti, violin
Ashot Sarkissjan, violin 
Ralf Ehlers, viola
Lucas Fels, cello
 

The Arditti Quartet enjoys a world-wide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on 20th century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. World premieres of quartets by composers such as Ades, Andriessen, Aperghis, Birtwistle, Britten, Cage, Carter, Denisov, Dillon, Dufourt, Dusapin, Fedele, Ferneyhough, Francesconi, Gubaidulina, Guerrero, Harvey, Hosokawa, Kagel, Kurtag, Lachenmann, Ligeti, Maderna, Manoury, Nancarrow, Reynolds, Rihm, Scelsi, Sciarrino, Stockhausen, and Xenakis and hundreds more show the wide range of music in the Arditti Quartet’s repertoire.

The Arditti Quartet’s extensive discography now features over 200 CDs.

Over the past 30 years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 (Elliott Carter) and 2002 (Harrison Birtwistle). In 2004 they were awarded the ‘Coup de Coeur’ prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music. The prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize was awarded to them in 1999 for ‘lifetime achievement’ in music. They remain to this day, the only ensemble ever to receive it.

Artists website

Watch & Listen

Excerpt from Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit,” which will be performed by the Arditti Quartet at The Phillips Collection