Coull Quartet: Must It Be?

Chamber music has been called “the music of friends”. And for four decades as Quartet in Residence at the University of Warwick, the four extraordinary musicians of the Coull Quartet have explored every facet of human emotion. Their annual concert series is at the heart of the Warwick Arts Centre programme: concerts where the intimate becomes universal, secrets are shared, and everyone present is invited to experience the innermost feelings of some of the greatest minds in human history, in music of joy, sorrow and transcendent beauty.

So join Roger Coull, Philip Gallaway, Rose Redgrave and Nicholas Roberts as they take timeless music and make it vibrantly new.

Haydn – Quartet in G Op.77 No 1
Shostakovich – Quartet No 12 in D flat Op.133
Beethoven – Quartet in F Op.135

“Must it be?” wrote Ludwig van Beethoven over the last movement of his very last quartet. What follows might surprise you – as he answers his own question with a peal of laughter. But then, nothing is predictable in this concert of late masterpieces by composers whose spirit grew younger even as they grew older.

Haydn opens his penultimate quartet with a catchy march, Beethoven mixes deadpan wit with sublime tenderness, and in the year The Beatles released the White Album, Dmitri Shostakovich moves off in a startling new direction. Yet he’s never sounded more devastatingly like himself. Unforgettable.

Pre-concert talk
Helen Martin Studio 6.15pm. Tickets £1

Robert Meikle, former Head of Music at Birmingham University, will discuss Beethoven’s Op 135 quartet.