Minguet Quartett

On January 29, 2024, the international music world commemorates the 100th birthday of Luigi Nono, one of the most important composers of the post-war avant-garde, alongside Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Vienna Konzerthaus celebrates this day with a special concert, the dramaturgy of which the renowned Minguet Quartet has developed with its mentor Walter Levin: Already in the 1950s, the leader of the legendary LaSalle Quartet, whose 100th birthday also falls in the year 2024, had asked Nono to compose a string quartet. However, it was only in 1979/80 that the groundbreaking work »Fragments – Silence, to Diotima« was created, whose almost silently resounding aftermath continues to resonate through the further history of advanced composition to this day. In its birthday concert, the Minguet Quartet precedes this main work of later 20th-century chamber music, rich in almost inaudible but nevertheless almost omnipresent intertextual references, with older compositions whose traces are inscribed in Nono's string quartet in one way or another: the chanson »Malheur me bat,« attributed to Johannes Ockeghem in some sources, whose main voice Nono discreetly quotes towards the end of his quartet, then Giuseppe Verdi's »Ave Maria«, a captivating harmonization of that »Scala enigmatica« which, as basic material, runs not only through the quartet but virtually the entire late work of Nono, and finally, the »Holy Song of Thanksgiving« from Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet op. 132, which, in its last recurrence, bears the performance designation »With deepest feeling«, a designation that can be found at several key points in Nono's quartet as well.