Founded in 2016 in Guimarães, Portugal, by Emanuel Salvador, Álvaro Pereira, Emilia Goch and Catarina Fernandes, the Guimarães String Quartet has enjoyed a unique place at the heart of the Guimarães Artist in Residence Program. The city’s main objective with the project is to create a strong artistic identity aligned with supporting architecture, visual arts, dance and fine arts in an attempt to promote the artistic theme "made in" Guimarães. This innovative project aims to develop a continual stream of chamber music provided by the city of Guimarães. Based on a series of regular concerts around the city, the main objective of the Quartet is to promote Guimarães and serve as an ambassador of the city, both in Portugal and abroad. Led by violinist, Emanuel Salvador, proclaimed by The Strad as “one of the finest Portuguese violinists of his generation,” the ensemble has established itself internationally by touring Germany and performing in Macao.
The ensemble will perform the String Quartet of the pivotal Portuguese composer, Luís de Freitas Branca, who studied composition in Paris and drew inspiration from Claude Debussy and César Frank and the work of his student José Braga Santos, whose String Quartet was composed in 1957 under the influence of contemporary musical trends, atonality, and the music of Jean Sibelius and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Additionally, they will present The Dresden Quartet by Serbian composer Aleksandar Simić.
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy was born in Hamburg on February 3, 1809 and died November 4, 1847 in Leipzig. He was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor. His music reflects a fundamental tension between Classicism and Romanticism in the generation of German composers after Beethoven. Felix was still young when his parents converted from Judaism to Christianity and changed the family name to Bartholdy in order to assimilate into German society. Felix went by Mendelssohn Bartholdy for the rest of his life, but he privately resented the change. Mendelssohn composed five symphonies, numerous orchestral, stage and chamber works, and hundreds of vocal works, before his death at age thirty-eight. His String Quartet No. 6 is considered to be the composer's greatest achievement in the field of string music.
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator