Yggdrasil Quartet

The Yggdrasil Quartet emerged among the most exciting new string quartets in the 1990s and has turned into a champion of new quartet music in European countries. Its associates, Frederick Paulsson and Per ?-guy (the violinists), Robert Westlund (viola), and Per Nyström (cello) examined at exactly the same time on the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. They continued to further research with Hungarian composer György Kurtag, after that in classes in interpretation with Norbert Brainin, the first choice from the Amadeus Quartet. In 1990 the four officially announced themselves as a normal string quartet. They find the name Yggdrasil, which may be the name of the fantastic ash tree at the guts of very much Nordic mythology. (In Wagner’s Band, it really is this tree that Wotan produced his spear and eventually decreases and areas around Valhalla in planning for the ultimate conflagration.) The Yggdrasil Quartet started by entering tournaments and gained worldwide see when the won the London International String Quartet Competition as well as the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition. In 1995 the municipal federal government of Aberdeen, Scotland inserted into an agreement with Aberdeen School to make a exclusive residency plan wherein a string quartet would live, perform, and train in Aberdeen for a number of months a 12 months more than a four-year period. The procedure of selecting the quartet was a rigorous open competition, that your Yggdrasil won. Pursuing that, the Concert Hall of Stockholm acknowledged the Quartet using its Swedish Increasing Stars honor for 1996. At that time they had began documenting for the Stockholm-based Bis record organization. Their 1st recording was a couple of string quartets by Icelandic composer Jon Leifs, which continued to earn the Cannes MIDEM Honor to discover the best chamber music disk of 1996. They documented the entire quartets of their countryman Franz Berwald. This launch was nominated for any Gramophone Award. The possess embarked on an intrinsic recording from the fifteen Dmitri Shostakovich string quartets, and with pianist Fumiko Shiraga premiered the initial versions of both Chopin piano concertos, that have been 1st created for piano and quartet, in the Norwich Festival in 1998, pursuing that with additional shows in Palma, Majorca, in Munich, and on a Bis Compact disc. This program offers proven well-known, and was repeated in 1999 in holland, Austria, Turkey, and London. Modern composers have already been drawn by their virtuosity and sympathy for contemporary style. Among the 1st new functions was the consequence of a commission rate from your Highland Event for Nigel Osborne to create a work to them. The effect was a quintet known as Forest, River, Sea for String Quartet and Calyx (the historic Celtic battle trumpet). This, subsequently, inspired the primary British isles composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies to create a Quintet for Trumpet and Strings for the Yggdrasil and trumpeter John Wallace. Carrying on their string of uncommon brand-new quartets, the Yggdrasil collaborated with Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie in the premiere of Haflidi Hallgrimsson’s Quintet for Percussion and Strings on the Northlands Festival.