The Hagen Quartet has been one of the world’s finest string quartets for many years and in 2021 celebrated its 40th anniversary. The Quartet’s attractive and intelligently devised concert programmes cover repertory from early epochs to Haydn to Kurtág, exploring the entire history of the string quartet.
In the 2024/25 season the Hagen Quartet focused especially on the string quartets of Haydn, Schumann, Janáček and Brahms. Mozart and Brahms’s quintets for clarinet and strings with Sabine Meyer and Jörg Widmann and Schubert’s Quintet with Julia Hagen and Gautier Capuçon were also on their programme. This season’s tours took the Hagen Quartet to France, Norway, Germany, Italy, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the USA. Following a cycle of concerts in the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Quartet performed at venues including the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, London’s Wigmore Hall and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. In the 2025/26 season the quartet will mark the conclusion of its exceptional, decades-long career with several farewell concerts.
The Hagen Quartet has been an honorary member of the Vienna Konzerthaus since 2012 and in 2019 won the Concertgebouw Amsterdam Prize for its charismatic artistic contribution to the organization over many years.
The Hagen Quartet has maintained and intensified its contacts with contemporary composers, both through performing existing repertory and by giving premieres of new works. Working with artistic personalities such as György Kurtág and the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt has been as important to the Quartet as its joint appearances with fellow performers including Gautier Capuçon, Sol Gabetta, Kirill Gerstein, Igor Levit, Maurizio Pollini (†), Heinrich Schiff (†), Mitsuko Uchida, Jörg Widmann and Krystian Zimerman.
The Hagen Quartet’s spectacular career began in 1981 in Salzburg. In its early years the Quartet had great success in competitions, and signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. Its decades-long collaboration with this label has resulted in numerous recordings, through which the ensemble has developed a vast repertory and a unique profile. Since 2011 the Hagen Quartet has worked with the record label myrios classics: its recordings of Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet with Jörg Widmann and Mozart’s string quartets received international acclaim from critics, and won prizes including the Echo Klassik and the Diapason d’Or. In 2019 a recording of Brahms’s Third String Quartet and Piano Quintet with Kirill Gerstein followed.
For many young string quartets, the Hagen Quartet is an important role model in terms of sound quality, stylistic diversity, ensemble playing and serious analysis of works and composers in their genre. As teachers and mentors at the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Hochschule für Musik in Basel, and in international masterclasses, the Quartet’s members take pride in passing on their vast experience to their younger colleagues.
The Hagen Quartet’s members perform on early Italian master instruments.
