BIOGRAPHY
"We need the inspiration of the public", said Raphaël Merlin in an interview with the NZZ in 2020. This was one of the central ideas of his Beethoven Around the World project. Between May 2019 and January 2020, the Quartet recorded Beethoven's 16 string quartets in a global project on six continents. With this recording, the four celebrate their 20th stage anniversary, having performed in major European venues such as the Philharmonie in Paris or the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, as well as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Verbier Festival and the Konzerthaus in Vienna .
After his studies with the Quatuor Ysaÿe in Paris, as well as with Gábor Takács, Eberhard Feltz and György Kurtág, he had exceptional and unprecedented success in the 2004 ARD Music Competition, which marked the beginning of the rise to fame of the Quatuor Ébène and which resulted in numerous awards and recognitions.
In addition to the traditional repertoire, the quartet immerses itself in other styles. He has published three albums of jazz and pop songs, Fiction (2010), Brazil (2014) and Eternal Stories (2017), enthusiastically received by the public and critics.
The albums of the Quatuor Ébène, with recordings of Bartók, Beethoven, Debussy, Haydn, Fauré and the Mendelssohn brothers, have received numerous awards, including the Gramophone, the BBC Music Magazine and the Midem Classic Award.
The Quartet has managed to reach a wide audience of young listeners and transmit its talent in regular master classes at the Paris Conservatoire. In 2021, the quartet was also commissioned by the Munich University of Music and Performing Arts to create a string quartet class as part of the newly founded Quatuor Ébène Academy.
This 2022-2023 season, Quatuor Ébène will be Radio France's resident quartet. Together with the Belcea Quartet, they will perform a joint cycle at the Konzerthaus in Vienna. In addition, they will be the resident quartet at the Beethovenfest in Bonn. They will also continue their three-part concert series in Munich at the Konzertdirektion Hörtnagel. Other highlights of the season include concerts at the Tonhalle in Zurich, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Philharmonics in Berlin and Luxembourg and London's Wigmore Hall.
