The Alkyona String Quartet was formed in 2018 and were Making Music selected artists in 2020–21. They issued their debut album “Intimate Letters” in June 2020 and are presently Royal College of Music String Quartet Fellows.

The six works of Haydn’s Op 76 are his penultimate set of quartets and, in terms of self- assuredness and bold innovation, are at the pinnacle of his achievement. Like the others in the set, the first quartet combines maximum technical ingenuity with profundity, tunefulness and accessibility.

Errki-Sven Tüür (b. 1959) is an Estonian composer whose music is influenced by his rock career in the 1970s and by folk music. This piece was written in response to the sudden death at the age of thirty-one of his friend Urmas Kibuspuu, a well-known Estonian actor.

As with his symphonic writing, Brahms was cautious about issuing works in a genre in which Beethoven had been so pre-eminent. The A minor Quartet which concludes the concert is his second quartet, evolving over some 8 years; a work rich, dramatic yet lyrical, with a pervading feeling of autumnal melancholy.