Skazka Quartet

With the Hidden Jewels concerts, the festival offers opportunities to young musicians and ensembles to present themselves with their own program at a beautiful location. Today it is the turn of the Skazka Quartet, which offers a beautiful program in the Michael’s Chapel of the Dom Tower with atmospheric work by Purcell and two string quartets by Mozart and Tailleferre.

The Dutch Skazka Quartet, founded in 2020, has been on the rise since winning the Storioni Competition in 2022. The quartet lives up to its name in many venues and turns the music on the programme into real stories. ‘The quartet thus confirms the meaning of their name, where the Russian ‘skazka’ means story or fairy tale’, a reviewer once wrote. ‘The narrative layer that the Skazka Quartet imperceptibly strokes through it gives them empathy.’

The quartet’s balanced programme starts with a few Fantasias by Henry Purcell and, via the String Quartet by Germaine Tailleferre, ends with Mozart’s String Quartet KV 421, the second of the so-called Haydn string quartets. The choice for the equally lyrical and concise String Quartet by the only female member of the Parisian Groupe des Six is ​​particularly characteristic of the Skazka Quartet’s drive.