Auryn Quartet & Peter Orth
Biography Auryn Quartet & Peter Orth
Auryn Quartet
An outstanding career spanning four decades has made the Auryn Quartet one of
the most sought-after, and respected Ensembles performing around the globe.
The Quartet has not changed its personnel over this long period, and continues with its fresh, and pioneering approach to all genres of music.
The Auryn‘s main mentors were the Amadeus Quartet and the Guarneri Quartet, with which they studied from 1982 to 1987 in Cologne, Germany and at the University of Maryland, USA respectively. Claudio Abbado was also an important influence on the Quartet‘s development, under whose baton they were string principles in the European Union Youth Orchestra.
The Quartet won its first prizes at the London International Competition and the ARD Munich Competition, both in 1982, one year after its inception. The Ensemble also won the main prize at the European Broadcasting Competition in Bratislava in 1989.
Invitations to international music festivals followed in quick succession: Lockenhaus, Salzburger Festspiele, Edinburgh International Festival, Musiktage-Mondsee, Stavangar festivals, to name a few.
The Auryn Quartet has had many fruitful musical partnerships, with performers such as Menahem Pressler, Tabea Zimmermann, Alexander Lonquich, Sharon Kam, Julian Bliss, Nobuko Imai, Christian Poltéra, Peter Orth, Michael Tree, Cecile Licad, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christine Schäfer and many others.
The Auryns have been working exclusively with the TACET record company exclusively since 2000.The Quartet has a vast catalogue of CDs; amongst them are recordings of the complete string quartets by Haydn (68 quartets in all !), Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, not to mention their recordings of the “Haydn-Quartets” by Mozart. The award-winning Fauré, Brahms and Schumann piano quintets with Peter Orth, and adding their most recent recording of the complete Mozart viola quintets with Nobuko Imai, makes for a very compelling discography.
Recent tours have taken the Quartet from the Lincoln Center, NY to the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, to the Wigmore Hall, London, where they performed a complete cycle of the Beethoven string quartets.
The Auryn Quartet undertook a vast project, and performed all of Haydn’s Quartets in 18-concert cycles in each of the cities of Detmold, Cologne and Padova, Italy.
Upcoming venues will include the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg, the Conservatoire Royal in Brussels, the Beethoven Fest, Bonn and the Philharmonie in Cologne.
The Auryns will also be touring in Canada and USA in July and October 2020.
The four musicians of the Auryn Quartet play on wonderful Italian instruments: a Stradivari violin (1722 Ex- Joachim), a Petrus Guarneri violin, a Brothers Amati viola (1616), and a Niccolo Amati cello.
Since 2003 the Quartet has been sharing its wealth of experience with musicians of younger generations, in the form of a teaching position at the Music Academy in Detmold, Germany where they are professors for chamber-music.
