Projects

Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet created a unique masterpiece with The Juliet Letters (1993), blending vocals and string quartet in a “song sequence with a title”. Inspired by letters to “Juliet” from Verona, the 20 songs delve into themes of love, loss, and human struggles. The cycle transcends genres by merging elements of classical music, pop, and jazz into a unified whole.

For our third CD production, we present our friend and singer Karsten Schmidt-Hern, who introduced us to this magnificent music.

Tracks:

1. Deliver Us
2. For Other Eyes
3. Swine
4. Expert Rites
5. Dead Letter
6. I Almost Had A Weakness
7. Why?
8. Who Do You Think You Are?
9. Taking My Life In Your Hands
10. This Offer Is Unrepeatable
11. Dear Sweet Filthy World
12. The Letter Home
13. Jacksons, Monk And Rowe
14. This Sad Burlesque
15. Romeo’s Seance
16. I Thought I’d Write To Juliet
17. Last Post
18. The First To Leave
19. Damnation’s Cellar
20. The Birds Will Still Be Singing

Mehr Infos zur CD

Can the first few bars of a work give you an idea of its full scope? It is often the small, easily overlooked details at the beginning of a composition that create magic and captivate us as listeners.

For our 2nd CD production we chose works by Beethoven, Holst, und Szymanowski, and although the contrasts between the pieces are obvious at first glance, there is one thing they have in common: their beginnings.

Tickets here

30.09.2024 
schöne welt, wo bist du?
19:30, orangerie im günthersburgpark
Malion Quartett and Kit Armstrong (Piano)
Szymanowski, Montgomery und Dvořák
35€/20€

2.10.2024 
ON/OFFstage: beethoven
19:30, orangerie im günthersburgpark
25€/15€

4.10.2024 
colours of the night
19:30 orangerie im günthersburgpark
Holst, Dutilleux und Schubert
35 €/20€

5.10.2024 
ON/OFFstage: webern
19:30 orangerie im günthersburgpark
25€/15€

6.10.2024 
OFFstage: pop-up konzert
15:00 orangerie im günthersburgpark
pay what you can

11.10.2024 
luft von anderen planeten
20:00, alte oper frankfurt
Malion Quartett und Daria Tymoshenko (Soprano)
Bach, Mozart and Schönberg
Tickets from 21,60 €

Debut-CD: a scary but exciting term for any artist. What do we pick, what represents us, who are we? Our journey with Beethoven began unusually, at the start of 2021, when we somehow became more and more fascinated with Große Fuge op. 133, eventually ending up producing a recording and music video of this late work. After the great success of the Fuge, we decided to go back to the very first of Beethoven’s 16 quartets - to op.18 no.1. A fundamentally different piece, we became just as fond of discovering the earliest of the composer’s quartets, but for very different reasons - just as we were discovering ourselves as a group, Beethoven was discovering his own voice as a quartet composer. After working personally with the composer Jörg Widmann on his own first quartet, who spoke of the “burden of writing a quartet after all the greats - Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert,” it quickly became apparent to us that with the idea of embarking upon the “first” of any project, every artist is forced to recognise the enormity of the task ahead of them. It was therefore surprisingly easy to then pick the third and last piece for our CD: Brahms’ 2nd string quartet - one of the very first pieces which we played together, and a work which has since established itself as a firm favourite within the group. 

Ultimately, this collection of “firsts” seemed to resonate with us the most - after all, isn’t it better to share the burden of a debut, than to shoulder it alone?

What is a string quartet and how does it work?

Whether you are a passionate string quartet listener or a first-time audience member of a classical music concert, with ON/OFFstage, the Malion Quartet presents an exclusive chance to peek behind the curtain and experience firsthand how a string quartet creates its magic. With Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in g-minor as the centrepiece of the evening, the quartet will dive into the musical score, take it apart and put it under a microscope, look at the music from different angles, and reveal what a rehearsal of the Malion Quartet might look like. The evening will be filmed live, with acclaimed director and close friend of the quartet Andreas Kessler behind the camera and will finish with a concert performance of the entire string quartet.

A film by Andreas Kessler

The sun motionless, as the earth revolves around it. With what forces could one associate or even compare the radical uncompromising thought processes of Beethoven in his late work, the “Grand Fugue” op.133?

Since the advent of our ensemble, finding new and innovative ways of conveying music to our audience has sparked our continued creative curiosity. The question of ‘Music through the Internet – is it even possible?’ has been a topic of intense discussion within our ensemble. Is it possible to touch people and create emotionally rich experiences through the medium of technology? Could we create a new reality?

The intention of this project was not to present a conventional concert, whether it be pre- or during-pandemic, but rather to understand media as a new reality and to research and determine its parameters, creating the greatest possible intensity of experience, despite the distance created by a screen.

In order to make a piece of music understandable in a unique way, we began by searching for experiences that are universally comprehensible. In conversation with the director, Andreas Kessler, it became clear that light, in particular sunlight, could be this associative force, as the physical and sensual effect of the sun is something which every human being can identify with.

On the island of Krk in Croatia, different phases of light and darkness can be experienced or captured particularly well. Centred around a stationary quartet, the passage of time and the transformation of light portrays the continued evolution of music; only at the brightest point does the camera capture the faces of the players; music and luminescent energy face each other eye to eye. Musically, we have now reached the most powerful climax of the fugue, after which the light breaks, shadows become longer, the day fades, the moon rises, music and players disappear into the darkness.

Want to learn more? Radio presenter Marie König talked about the experience of shooting a music video in an interview with director Andreas Kessler and the Malion Quartet.

Marie König:

I would like to start with a little quote from Theodor Adorno:

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes”. Adorno was of the opinion that late works by composers are usually no good, and this was also true of this opus.
As Bettina said in the greeting: at the premiere, Beethoven’s contemporaries and many people in the decades thereafter also found this work too rough and too complex. It is not easy to follow this music and it can easily overwhelm you, but then there are also moments that are so gentle and tender and beautiful that you just have to love them…

Read the full interview (german)

This year we had the privilege of hosting the first edition of the Malion Music Festival. Rather than presenting a full programme of three pieces every evening, each of the five concerts of this series focused on a single work of the string quartet literature. The first half of the evening was spent collectively discovering and getting to know the composer and their work. In the second half, the respective work was then performed in its entirety.

Want to learn more? Read a review of the festival by a regular audience member…

On February 8th, 2022 at 7:30 pm it was finally time: the portal to the Orangerie in Günthersburgpark in Frankfurt was opened and the first edition of the Malion Music Festival could begin. With a total of five concerts within one week, the four young musicians pursued a completely new concept. Unlike the usual concert format, only one piece for string quartet was the focus of each evening…

PDF: Programmheft

CD

Debut-CD – an exciting, but also somewhat frightening term for any musician.

What do we choose, what represents us, who are we?

DVD

One project of the Malion Quartet.

The sun stands still. The earth revolves around the sun. With what forces could one associate or even compare the radical, uncompromising thought processes of Beethoven in his late work, the “Grand Fugue” op.133?

Bag

Carry Beethoven’s spirit into the world…

On the occasion of the Beethoven Year 2020, we commissioned British-Ukrainian designer Yosef Tyminsky to portray Beethoven in a single line, that is, without lifting the pen once.