Last night marked the first of our ensemble rounds for this year’s Annual Music Competition, which included any ensembles that are made up of string and keyboard instruments, and this year we had four incredible string quartets to perform for our audience. 

The evening began with the Behn Quartet who performed Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ Movement for String Quartet (2016), as well as Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major. This was followed the winners of our Elias Fawcett Trust Prize in 2014, the Zelkova Quartet, performing the Beethoven String Quartet in E Minor, second movement and Debussy String Quartet in G Minor, first movement.

After a short interval the Eusebius Quartet took to the stage with a contrasting performance of the first movement of the Haydn Quartet in D Major, followed by Bartok’s more contemporary String Quartet No. 3. Closing the evening was the Marmen Quartet, also performing the first movement of the Ravel String Quartet in F Major. They completed their programme with the third movement of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F Minor, culminating with the lively fourth movement of Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major.

The evening was extremely enjoyable for all who attended and after a glass of wine for the audience and tough decision for the judges, the Marmen Quartet were crowned the winners of the ROSL Award for String/Piano Ensembles. They will be performing at our Gold Medal Final in June, along with our solo prizewinners and our final ensemble. To find out who will be completing the line up, join us next week for our mixed ensembles Section Final. Tickets are available here. If you can’t make a Tuesday, we have our Overseas Award final on Thursday 22 March where the top musicians from around the world will be competing to win the Lorna Viol Memorial Prize, as well as our trophy commission from the Royal College of Art. Tickets for the Overseas Final, can be purchased here

Marmen quartet win

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