Navarra Quartet
Benjamin Marquise Gilmore violin
Bartosz Woroch violin
Sasha Bota viola
Brian O'Kane cello

Mozart Quartet in D minor K421 [1783]
Maconchy Quartet No.3 [1938]
Tchaikovsky Quartet No.3 in E flat minor [1876]

Elizabeth Maconchy was born in England in 1907 to Irish parents and was a prolific and successful composer through much of the twentieth century. The third of her thirteen quartets is among the most popular and was written with Europe on the cusp of yet another war; it is dramatic, yearning and very much according to her feeling that ‘the best music is an impassioned argument’. Brian O’Kane’s celebrated Navarra Quartet opens with Mozart’s much loved D minor quartet and ends with Tchaikovsky’s towering third quartet, perhaps most memorable for its slow movement which alternates between a doom-laden funeral march and the radiant beauty of remembrance.

Presented by NCH in association with the National String Quartet Foundation