Since their formation in 2020 at the Royal Academy of Music, and studying with some of the most illustrious chamber music performers, the Kyan Quartet have won numerous international prizes and have performed around the globe. We are delighted to welcome them to Wallingford to perform for us.

Mozart’s D minor string quartet is the second of the set of six works dedicated to Haydn. Some of the music was apparently written while the composer’s wife, Constanze, was in labour with their first child in the next room; a fact which may or may not account for the work’s emotional turbulence.

Shostakovich’s F sharp minor quartet is the shortest of his fifteen string quartets. Its three movements, played without a break, were written in memory of his first wife, Nina, who had died in 1954. The quartet was competed in 1960, the year that would have marked her fiftieth birthday.

Schumann’s three string quartets Op. 41 were written in a short period of intense activity in 1842, the result of his wife Clara’s encouragement to prove himself in the traditional genres of chamber and symphonic writing, having previously focussed on piano music and song.