The Art of Fugue

The string quartet as a social microcosm.

The string quartet is made up of four instruments, each with its own voice and personality. The four voices interact as individuals, but within a malleable whole: the result is a social microcosm of possible relationships. Nowhere else are these interactions more richly played out than in the musical form of the fugue, a mischievous canon which is part ritual and part rhetorical exercise.

Grounded by the spiritual zen of Bach's Art of Fugue, this programme traverses Mozart's playful and theatrical use of the fugue and ends up with Beethoven's epic Grosse Fuge, a piece that nearly breaks the form open in the struggle for balance between the individual and the group.