Symphony4Vienna Quartett / Haydn, Wolf, Beethoven

“The string quartet is, to a certain extent, the quintessence of the symphony”, says the ensemble Symphony4Vienna. In that spirit, you can experience the richness of musical ideas, the love of experimentation and the peerless profundity of the symphony concentrated and reduced to four voices in the group’s concert during this year’s Wiener Symphoniker Chamber Music Festival. On the programme, three string quartets: Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in F minor is followed by Hugo Wolf’s Italian Serenade, heard here in the original arrangement, which is now rare having been overshadowed by the version for string orchestra. The finale of the evening comprises the first of the three Rasumovsky Quartets by Ludwig van Beethoven, rightly regarded as the “Eroica of string quartets”.