Quatuor Fidelio and Quatuor Hermès perform Ullman, Monbet, and Glière

The Quatuor Fidelio and Quatuor Hermès join forces at the 2026 Festival Singer-Polignac in a stirring program of twentieth-century chamber music. A student of Schoenberg, Viktor Ullmann wrote his third string quartet in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1943. The masterful single-movement work is filled with poignant melodies and striking contrast, attesting to the artistic resilience of the composer and the power of music in extreme adversity. Composed in 2025 for the Quatuor Fidelio, Fiona Monbet’s Quasar is named for the blazing center of an active galaxy, occurring when immense amounts of matter fall into a supermassive black hole. The program concludes with Reinhold Glière’s String Octet in D Major, an immediate musical success upon its publication at the turn of the twentieth century, celebrated for its lush romanticism and idiomatic instrumentation.