Coull Quartet: A Nightingale Sings

Chamber music has been called “the music of friends”. And for four decades as Quartet in Residence at the University of Warwick, the four extraordinary musicians of the Coull Quartet have explored every facet of human emotion. Their annual concert series is at the heart of the Warwick Arts Centre programme: concerts where the intimate becomes universal, secrets are shared, and everyone present is invited to experience the innermost feelings of some of the greatest minds in human history, in music of joy, sorrow and transcendent beauty.

So join Roger Coull, Philip Gallaway, Rose Redgrave and Nicholas Roberts as they take timeless music and make it vibrantly new.

Haydn – Quartet in E flat Op.76 No 6
Britten – Quartet No 1 in D Op.25
Schumann – Quartet in F Op.41 No 2

“I’ve been composing so much that it seems uncanny” declared Robert Schumann. “I should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale”. And in his Second Quartet, he sang his heart out, in music that bubbles over with freshness, warmth and the irresistible joie de vivre of a man in love.

Benjamin Britten unleashed the same energy in his bracing wartime First Quartet – every bit the work of a young genius let off the leash. It’s an exuberant start to the Coulls’ Britten birthday celebrations, and the perfect foil to the wit and wisdom of Haydn’s glorious late quartet.

Pre-concert talk:
Helen Martin Studio 6.15pm. Tickets £1