Program: Béla Bartók: String Quartet No.5. -break- String Quartet No.2. String Quartet No.4. Kelemen Quartet: Barnabás Kelemen - violin Gábor Homoki - violin Katalin Kokas - viola Dóra Kokas - cello The Kelemen Quartet, founded in Budapest 2010, has already gained a reputation as one of the world’s most exciting young chamber ensembles. It has performed in Hungary, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, the USA and Australia. They have collaborated with string players Joshua Bell, Pekka Kuusisto, Joseph Lendvay, Maxim Rysanov and Nicolas Altstaedt and pianists Peter Frankl, José Gallardo and Ferenc Rados. The Kelemen Quartet received further tuition from such distinguished artists as András Schiff, Günter Pichler, Zoltán Kocsis, Miklós Perényi, Péter Komlós and Gábor Takács-Nagy. All four of the Kelemen Quartet’s members are prizewinning Hungarian musicians, admired both as soloists and as chamber players, and close-knit both professionally and personally. The quartet’s leader, Barnabás Kelemen, and its viola player, Katalin Kokas, are Professors of Violin at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Music Academy; Kelemen performs internationally as a concerto soloist and conductor, while Kokas is founding artistic director of the International Chamber Music Festival in the Hungarian city of Kaposvár. Second violinist Gábor Homoki studied with both Kelemen and Kokas in Budapest, and cellist Dóra Kokas – a student of László Mező and Miklós Perényi at the Franz Liszt Academy – is Katalin’s younger sister. In Spring 2011, on the Kelemen Quartet’s first US tour, the Dallas News, highlighting “the most electrifying string-quartet concert in recent memory”, praised the ensemble’s “highly inflected and vividly interactive music-making”. The quartet returned to the USA several times since. Their international reputation was further enhanced in July 2011 with three prizes from the 6th Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition: the overall Second Prize, the Audience Prize and the Musica Viva Grand Prize, which resulted in the Australian tour planned for 2014. At the Premio Paolo Borciani in Reggio Emilia, also in 2011, Ensemble magazine found that the players “… lit a firework of emotions, wrestling with the emotion in the music”, and described the Kelemen Quartet as “… perhaps one of the greatest discoveries of this competition”. The quartet had his debut and radio recording to the Berlin Philharmonie in 2012, appeared at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and debuted at Wigmore Hall in 2013. The Kelemen Quartet’s repertoire currently includes works by Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bartók, Ligeti and Kurtág. Recording of the present concert will provide the first part of a forthcoming CD at Belgian label Out-There Music, who have commissioned the Kelemen Quartet to record all of the six Bartók string-quartets for their forthcoming release, a quite unique venture on the CD-market. Tickets are available for 2000 HUF on the spot, in the national JEGYPONT network of Interticket and online at JEGY.HU ℗ BMC