Quatuor Ébène

The French Quatuor Ébène is one of the most exciting string quartets of our time. In the last two decades the quartet has set the highest standards, going beyond perfection in bringing new insights to well-known repertory, and always seeking to engage with its audiences. A new dimension was added early in 2024 when the cellist Yuya Okamoto joined the ensemble.

After studying with the Quatuor Ysaÿe in Paris and with Gábor Takács-Nagy, Eberhard Feltz and György Kurtág, the quartet won the ARD International Music Competition in 2004. This marked the beginning of Quatuor Ébène’s international career, which since then has featured regular performances at concert halls such as Carnegie Hall in New York, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam and the Wigmore Hall, and at international festivals such as the Verbier Festival, the Hohenems Schubertiade and the Salzburg Festival.

Since 2021/22 the quartet has been performing a concert cycle with the Belcea Quartet at the Vienna Konzerthaus. In 2023/24 the two ensembles also toured together as an octet. The Quatuor Ébène was also ensemble in residence at the Philharmonie du Luxembourg and in 2024/25 it performed three times in Paris as quartet in residence with Radio France.

The Quatuor Ébène’s many recordings, which include works by Bartók, Beethoven, Debussy, Haydn, Fauré and the Mendelssohn siblings, have won numerous awards, such as the Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine and Midem Classical Awards. In 2015/16 the musicians of Quatuor Ébène dedicated themselves to song. They appeared on the album Green — Mélodies françaises sur des poèmes de Verlaine with Philippe Jaroussky (BBC Music Magazine Award 2016) and recorded a Schubert album with Matthias Goerne. Together with Gautier Capuçon the quartet has performed Schubert’s String Quintet, and with Antoine Tamestit it has released a recording of Mozart’s String Quintets K. 515 and K. 516 that won the Choc Classica, the Diapason d’Or and a Gramophone ‘Recording of the Month‘. To mark the quartet’s 20th anniversary in 2019, the four musicians recorded Beethoven’s 16 string quartets in a global project covering six continents.

The quartet’s versatility is demonstrated by the fact that it regularly explores other styles in addition to the traditional repertory, as in Fiction, featuring jazz arrangements (2010), the crossover album Brazil (2014) and Eternal Stories with Michel Portal (2017). In June 2024 Quatuor Ébène began a new project, Waves, with the electronic sound artist Xavier Triboulet.

Quatuor Ébène’s other prizes and awards include the Belmont Prize of the Forberg-Schneider Foundation (2005), an award from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (2007) and, in 2019 — the first ensemble to be so honoured — the Frankfurt Music Prize.

In 2021 the University of Music and Theatre in Munich commissioned Quatuor Ébène to set up a string quartet class as part of the newly founded Quatuor Ébène Academy.

Pierre Colombet is playing two violins: a 1717 Antonio Stradivari violin, the ‘Piatti’, kindly loaned by a generous sponsor through the Beare’s International Violin Society, and a 1736 Matteo Goffriller violin generously loaned by Gabriele Forberg-Schneider, as well as a bow by Charles Tourte (Paris, 19th century) also loaned by Gabriele Forberg-Schneider.

Gabriel Le Magadure is playing two violins: a Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù violin (Cremona, 1743/45) generously loaned by Serge and Florent Boyer, and a violin from around 1740 with a Guarneri label loaned by Gabriele Forberg-Schneider. He plays a bow by Dominique Peccatte (c 1845) also loaned by Gabriele Forberg-Schneider.

Marie Chilemme is playing two violas: a 1734 Stradivari, the ‘Gibson’, generously loaned by the Stradivari Foundation Habisreutinger, and a viola by Marcellus Hollmayr (Füssen, 1625) loaned by Gabriele Forberg-Schneider.

Yuya Okamoto is playing a cello by Giovanni Grancino (Milan, 1682).