Stories Quartet

Change of venue! Due to the forecast of a high probability of showers, and storms in the late afternoon and evening, today’s concert will take place in the Synagogue Stupava (Hlavná street). Admission is free until the hall’s capacity is filled. Thank you for your understanding.

One of this year’s festival concerts in the much-loved Musical Gardens cycle will be held exceptionally also in Stupava. The additional concert by the ambitious young Stories Quartet, consisting of Karolína Krigovská (1st violin), Alžbeta Godovičová (2nd violin), Patrik Klačanský (viola) and Aleksei Kardash (cello), will at the same time be dedicated to the memory of Angelo Neumann, a celebrated native of Stupava. Neumann (1838 – 1910) was an opera singer, director, and subsequently a prominent theatre manager in a number of theatres in Europe (Leipzig, Bremen, Prague). The concert to be held on August 4, 2024, in the splendid historical Manor House Park in Stupava, will feature a programme made up of works by two giant figures of 19th century music who were Neumann’s contemporaries: Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) and Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843 – 1907). Their music represents two distinct artistic worlds, sources of inspiration, and contexts. In Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F Major one can feel the powerful influence of the American environment and the Black Spirituals, which inspired his composition during the period when he worked at the Conservatory in New York. Grieg’s music, by contrast, makes contact with the pure sonorousness of the northern tradition, with a surprisingly innovative mode of treating the very fundamentals of string quartet sound, prefiguring the new forms of music of the early 20th century.