Coull Quartet: Death in Venice

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 D Op.76 No 5
Britten – Quartet No 3 Op.94
Schumann – Quartet in A Op.41 No 3

Death in Venice… at the end of his life, Benjamin Britten turned Prospero, and dissolved his enchantments in the shimmering waters of his Third Quartet. He called its finale La Serenissima, and it’s hard to believe that such ravishing music was being written in the 1970s.

But hear it for yourself, at the still centre of an evening that opens with a glowing, sparkling surge of imagination from the 65 year old Haydn, and ends with the delirious lovesongs of Robert Schumann’s ardent Third Quartet. Young love, great conversation, and the biggest questions of all: the Coull Quartet proves, once again, that four players can say more than the mightiest orchestra.

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