Mandelring Quartet plays Beethoven, Shostakovich, and Ligeti in Friends of Chamber Music concert, October 29

Now in their 40th-anniversary year, critically acclaimed group returns to Vancouver for the first time since 2016

By emily lyth

Mandelring Quartet. Photo by Guido Werner

Friends of Chamber Music present the Mandelring Quartet on October 29 at 3 pm at the Vancouver Playhouse

GERMANY’S CRITICALLY acclaimed Mandelring Quartet is marking its 40th-anniversary year with concerts around the world. As luck would have it for local audiences, the group is returning to Vancouver in a Friends of Chamber Music show for the first time since 2016.

Violinists Sebastian Schmidt and Nanette Schmidt, violist Andreas Willwohl, and cellist Bernhard Schmidt craft a complex sound that has won them numerous prestigious competitions, including Germany’s ARD International Music Competition and Italy’s Premio Paolo Borciani.

In 1997, the group founded the annual Hambacher MusikFest, a beacon for chamber music in their hometown of Neustadt an der Weinstrasse.

The Mandelring Quartet have performed in Madrid’s Spanish Royal Palace four times, most recently this spring—the 18th-century Baroque architecture-style building, spanning 1.5 million square feet with over 1,400 rooms, is notably the largest royal palace in Europe. The group played using the royal collection of Stradivari instruments, crafted by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari from in the late 1600s and early 1700s and praised for their high-caliber sound.

Several CD recordings have been released by the quartet, earning them the German Record Critics’ Prize and nominations for the International Classical Music Awards. Their most recent release, 2021’s Debussy & Rivier string quartets, pairs the works of two French composers—one a well-known classic, the other a passionately varied hidden gem.

The quartet is set to play three stunning string works at the Vancouver Playhouse: Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 1 in C Major, Opus 49, Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti’s “Métamorphoses Nocturnes”, and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Opus 132.

Late Beethoven quartets are quintessential to any Friends of Chamber Music season, and Mandelring will deliver just that.  

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