Marmen Quartet | Leeds International Chamber Season 2023/24: French Connections

Joseph Haydn String Quartet Op 33, No 6

Tōru Takemitsu A Way A Lone

Claude Debussy String Quartet

This concert is the fifth of six in the Leeds International Chamber Season 2023/24: French Connections. View all six concerts.

Marmen Quartet opens this concert with Joseph Haydn’s hugely popular Quartet Op 33 No 6, followed by Tōru Takemitsu’s A Way A Lone, inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which was written for the tenth anniversary of the Tokyo String Quartet. Throughout his life Takemitsu was greatly inspired by the music of Claude Debussy.

A long-standing favourite of the chamber music repertoire, Debussy’s String Quartet conjures up a dizzying array of colours, astonishing beauty, and a huge variety of texture. Written in his early thirties, the music was startlingly unique for its time. One can detect the beginnings of a journey that would later give us masterpieces such as Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune and La mer, as well as inspiring composers such as Maurice Ravel, whose own string quartet is modelled on Debussy’s.