Edinburgh Quartet Lunchtime Series - Concerts 6

Haydn 'Emperor' Quartet, op. 76 no. 3

Pal Hermann - String Quartet (world premiere) 

Beethoven Op. 18 No. 6

The Edinburgh Quartet closes its lunchtime series with a programme that spans two centuries of the string quartet tradition and reaches across time to bring a lost voice back to life.

Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 6 captures the composer at his most playful and searching, its extraordinary final movement — marked La Malinconia — a glimpse of the revolutionary writing to come. Haydn's beloved 'Emperor' Quartet, with its great set of variations on the melody that became Austria's national anthem, is one of the most deeply satisfying works in the entire quartet canon.

At the heart of the programme sits something truly extraordinary: the world premiere of a recently discovered quartet by Pál Hermann. Hungarian-born and tragically killed in the Holocaust in 1944, Hermann left behind a small but remarkable body of work. To bring this quartet to life for the very first time is both a privilege and a responsibility — a reminder of what was silenced, and of music's power to endure.