Arditti Quartet, Yaron Deutsch, Stefan Prins

The Arditti Quartet enjoys a global reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Several hundred string quartets and other chamber works by composers such as Cage, Gubaidulina and Ligeti have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. The Arditti Quartet believes that close collaboration with composers is vital to the process of interpreting modern music and aims therefore to collaborate with every composer whose works it plays. 

Yaron Deutsch is a guitarist known for his work in the field of contemporary (classical) music. He is the founder and artistic director of the chamber quartet Nikel and a frequent guest in European ensembles such as Klangforum Wien and Ensemble Musikfabrik. As a soloist he performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others. Apart from his performative activities, he is a professor at the University of Music Basel and guitar tutor at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses. 

Stefan Prins is a composer and performer whose music includes and reflects on contemporary technologies and new media, thematizing their relationship with the physical, performing body and the environments it inhabits. After graduating as an engineer, he studied piano, composition and music technology in Brussels and The Hague. In 2017 he obtained a PhD in composition at Harvard University under the guidance of Chaya Czernowin. Together with Pieter Matthynssens, he is the artistic director of the Nadar Ensemble. 

Chaya Czernowin’s compositions are characterized by unfamiliar sound worlds, the use of noise, physical parameters and textures, as well as shifts in time, scale and perspective. These ways of thinking fuse her work with multi-sensory content and work to reach a sonic expression which includes the subconscious and goes beyond style, conventions or rationality. Czernowin was the first woman to be appointed as a composition professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria (2006-2009), and at Harvard University, USA (2009 to the present).