It is significant that in celebrating its two decades of life, the Quiroga Quartet has, above all, words of gratitude for those institutions that did their part to make a then chimerical dream possible. Because together with the Quartet Casals, which celebrated its quarter of a century in 2022, the Quiroga are pioneers of this golden age that the demanding string quartet now lives in Spain and especially in Catalonia.
Thanks to his talent and perseverance, but also his bravery – or call it unconsciousness –, this group that emerged in Madrid and has carried Barcelona in its heart since the Palau de la Música offered him the possibility of debuting in an international venue – “ winning El Primer Palau was an essential accolade, there we saw that, 'wow!, maybe it was possible to make a career as a quartet'” – can today fly the flag of a genre that already has local groups filling auditoriums and the shelves of the most demanding classical fans. Their latest work, Atomos, is an anniversary project with which they want to pay tribute to a genre without which, they insist, European cultural modernity cannot be understood.
Composed of the violinists Aitor Hevia (Tarragona, 1978, but from Oviedo family) and Cibrán Sierra (Ourense, 1979), and the Valencian viola Josep Puchades (who replaced Lander Etxebarría) and the Madrid cellist Helena Poggio, the group had great teachers: his father would be Rainer Schmidt, from the Hagen Quartet, with whom they studied at the Reina Sofía Music School; and his grandfather Walter Levin, from LaSalle, without forgetting Hatto Beyerle from Alban Berg. And perhaps that is why he has fully committed himself to teaching, like the Casals, which has changed the landscape in schools. Without going any further, last year's First Palau was won by the Atenea Quartet, made up of three Catalans and a Galician (their closing concert at the Palau will be this November 23).
The big question is always how to maintain that balance “so sophisticated, very difficult to achieve” that comes with being a cell of four artists who have to make concessions in favor of the group. “And that is also constantly changing, because neither we are the same nor our life is the same now as it was 20 years ago,” says Cibrán. One of the greatest challenges of the string quartet is that teamwork of such intensity.”
“I feel that the quartet has been a mirror, the things that can sometimes bother you about your teammates are a reflection of you or, on the contrary, you see things that you admire and strive for. If we are successful it is because all those barriers have been overcome and the four of us feel comfortable having each of us his space, his ego, his personality, but knowing how to manage that which fluctuates, because it is liquid,” adds Poggio.
“The genre itself is based on listening, on reacting; “The musical action itself is based on the fact that we are constantly reacting to see where the other is moving,” Sierra corroborates. “You are doing this with people you admire and respect deeply, because if not, you are no longer involved,” corroborates her violinist partner.
To celebrate their birthday, the Quirogas, winners of the 2018 National Music Prize, have brought together on a CD works by the three composers “who have been the pillars of the evolution of the genre.” Haydn, obviously, in the 18th century, and of course Beethoven in the 19th, but also Bartók in the 20th.
“We always talk about the holy trinity of the quartet: Haydn the father, Bartók the son and Beethoven the spirit. Bartók is also vital because he changes history with his six String Quartets, because of his way of approaching language, because of the sophistication, the depth, the architectures that he builds,” Elena points out.
“These six quartets are exercises in true intelligence that are very difficult to find, due to the fact that they use popular languages as a source of inspiration in a very deliberate way,” Sierra continues, “which opened the doors for many other avant-garde artists from many other spaces.” “They will work in very personal and very different ways.”
To this they add the fourth pillar of contemporaneity, which is Kurtág, with a work yet to be published, already in the 21st century. “He was the great genius of concision and synthesis. Every breath, every gesture in Kurtág contains a world, that is why it is so difficult and so risky and at the same time so exciting,” says Sierra.
The National Center for Musical Diffusion (CNDM) schedules six concerts for this anniversary in which they invite three of their regular collaborators: the pianist Javier Perianes, the violist Veronika Hagen and the clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann.
On the other hand, and although the string quartet is an incomprehensible repertoire – of Haydn's 68, the Quirogas aspire to record 20 –, the group wants to face its third decade by contributing its grain of sand: “We are missing something that history has denied, and is the female voice in the great canon of the string quartet.” In this sense, they will premiere in April in the Palau de la Música season the commission they gave to Raquel García Tomás even before the boom of Alexina B. And they plan to continue looking for other institutions with which to co-commission female composers.
“We cannot change the past, but we can act on the present and contribute to the immediate future,” they conclude.
