Quartet-lab’s concerts have been nothing less than mind blowing. Think of music being taken to a scientific lab for experimenting with newness, just like students play around with dangerous chemicals in a chemistry lab to come up with a new kind of a compound. Those of you who have been to Wigmore Hall recently in a quartet-lab’s concert will agree that music can be fascinating and explosive when anything is permissible and possible and audience can possibly comprehend it all.
During a concert arranged by quartet-lab and held at Wigmore Hall was an event of its kind. The quartet is made up of soloists who work together to expand the string quartet possibilities. As audience, you are never sure what is going to come out of this. At times it can be mesmerizing while it can be re-defining boundaries of music at other times.
Violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Pekka Kusisto along with cellist Pieter Wispelwey and viola player Lilli Maijala started the concert with “Battalia” by Heinrich Biber. During the performance, quartet-lab played some of the fiercest solos and probably the most vivid instrumental solos ever written while keeping the movements from Biber’s original as baseline.
At this amazing concert, quartet-lab actually created a new kind of a framework that provides new possibilities and offers a comprehensible expansion of music.
