Rothko String Quartet

STRUCTURE & FREEDOM - USA 2025

It’s our first trip to the US, our 2nd home and we are excited to present a new program in Boston and Baltimore.

Thanks to & for having us!

With its new program STRUCTURE AND FREEDOM, the Rothko String Quartet brings baroque, classical and contemporary styles together with US-American and German perspectives on the string quartet genre. While the fugues of Bach and Beethoven are highlights of strict counterpoint, Florence Price transfers this compositional principle into a romantic sound aesthetic and combines it closely with American spirituals. Sky Macklay condenses counterpoint to its smallest component, the cadence, and builds a completely new, complicated but enchantingly beautiful world from this formal cell, at the same time taking its own laws ad absurdum and breaking them in search of the limits of the string quartet. In the music of the composer inti figgis-vizueta, who has close ties to the Rothko Quartet, collaboration and coexistence are explored in a new way. In the contrasts of the styles assembled in this program lies an intermediate space that symbolizes the search for community, communication, empathy and contemporaneity, raising the question: what is our future and why is a string quartet sitting there?

As always thank you & for the support ❤️

Dear friends,

we’re thrilled to announce our residency with friend and longterm collaborator inti figgis-vizueta this summer at Peabody! From June 24-26 we will play concerts, give a seminar talks and interact with students and alumni of the Composition Department’s Low Residency Master’s Program. Huge thanks to Sky Macklay for the invitation!

inti & RSQ