ASASELLO QUARTET I.

Asasello will join this year’s festival with two concerts. The curator of the first one is Márton Illés, a composer living in Karlsruhe and Budapest. The organizers have asked him to choose pieces that have been references for his work, apart from his own composition written for the ensemble, and premiering in Hungary. 

“The main focus of the Cologne-based Asasello Quartett’s concert in Budapest is Heinz Holliger’s first string quartet, written in 1973. The Swiss oboist-composer’s more than 30-minute-long composition is one of the most vigorous a most revolutionary creations in the history of string quartets.  Helmut Lachenmann describes it this way: “A radical syntactic representation of a sound and noise world that was previously considered to be exterritorial, within the framework of the traditional genre, in which the speechlessness of the individual, broken by society. is thematized in the process of extinguishing, disappearing and becoming silent.” It could be said that the piece exploits every possible sound and alternative modes of articulation of string instruments, with its excessive creativity, richness of material and colour – all of this within the monumental structure of a dramatic conglomerate.

Zeitfragmente (Timepieces) is a composition by Jarrell Michael, another Swiss composer, which pushes the boundaries of how we sense time and processes in time. The musical segments are heavily contrasting, and they change their textures and energies suddenly, creating separating and connecting timelines in the listener’s memory.

 The first stop of my multipart, continuously expanding string quartet is the Húr-tér I.  With instruments in hand, I have personally experimented with the ever-changing and developing sounds, movements and technical solutions, which have matured into an individual language over time, and which come together into organically built, stretched, cathartically shaped forms, creating processes and gestures resembling psychophysical reflexes.”

Márton Illés

The Asasello Quartet is an european ensemble. Founded in the year 2000 by students in Walter Levin’s chamber music class at the Basel conservatory, the musicians have gone on to make a name for themselves as outstanding interpreters of the classical/Romantic repertoire, modern classical music and more. The founding fhour completed their formal studies with the Alban Berg Quartett and David Smeyers at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik und Tanz. Numerous accolades and awards as well as project funding grants have allowed the group to realize original concepts and to put new ideas, recording techniques and forms of concertizing into practice. Asasello programs are intelligent and sophisticated; never mainstream. If need be, “the Asasellos” will gladly jump from their chairs or out of their tuxes.