Coull Quartet: Russian Winter

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.

Shostakovich – Quartet No 11 in F minor Op.122
Tchaikovsky – Quartet No 3 in E flat minor Op.30
Glazunov – Prelude and Fugue in D minor
Haydn – Quartet in F Op.77 No 2

They called him ‘Papa’, but there’s nothing pipe-and-slippers about Joseph Haydn’s final string quartet. Chamber music simply doesn’t get any more masterly – or entertaining. So there’s no better finish to a concert that begins with the life-and-death questions of Shostakovich’s 11th Quartet, before exploring two composers deeply embedded in Shostakovich’s musical DNA.

Shostakovich supplied his teacher Glazunov with black market vodka; tonight, find out what Glazunov gave him in return! Tchaikovsky’s Third Quartet, meanwhile, is a true lost masterpiece, bursting with all the melody, fantasy and passionate emotion you’d expect from the composer of the Pathétique symphony. You’ll wonder why you’ve never heard it before.

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