Jaap Nico Hamburger: Piano Quartet Axel Strauss, Victor Fournelle-Blain, Yegor Dyachkov and Ilya Poletaev

• Jaap Nico Hamburger: Quartet for Violin, Viola, Violoncello, and Pianoforte:
• 1 Hamburger: Quartet for Violin, Viola, Violoncello, and Pianoforte: I. Andante 03:57
• 2 Hamburger: Quartet for Violin, Viola, Violoncello, and Pianoforte: II. Allegro Vivace 05:59
• 3 Hamburger: Quartet for Violin, Viola, Violoncello, and Pianoforte: III. Poco Andante - Quasi ad libitum 01:59
• Total Runtime 11:55

Info for Jaap Nico Hamburger: Piano Quartet

Jaap Nico Hamburger is the current Composer in Residence with Mécénat Musica in Montréal. His compositions include commissions for orchestra, opera, chamber music and solo works. His music has been performed and recorded in Canada, The Netherlands and Israel.

Recently, he was commissioned by the United Nations and the Government of the Netherlands to compose a new concerto on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the International Court of Justice. Other commissions include works for Discovery Channel as well as European broadcasting companies. He is a Canadian Music Centre Associate Composer. His Chamber Symphony No. 2 ‘Children’s War Diaries’ was nominated for the Matthijs Vermeulen Award (2021) and received a JUNO nomination for classical composition of the year (2022).

Featuring three movements, Jaap Nico Hamburger’s Piano Quartet takes listeners on a journey of emotional depth and melodic richness. From the introspective and contemplative “Andante” to the lively and vivacious “Allegro Vivace,” and the delicate and improvisational “Poco Andante – Quasi ad libitum,” this composition showcases Hamburger’s masterful compositional language and his ability to create a profound connection between visual art and music. This unique and evocative piano quartet is part of a forthcoming album, TzimTzum due in November 2023, which showcases the chamber works Jaap Nico Hamburger.

Axel Strauss, violin
Victor Fournelle-Blain, violin
Yegor Dyachkov, cello
Ilya Poletaev, piano

Axel Strauss
The first German artist to ever win the international Naumburg Violin Award in New York, Axel Strauss made his American debut at the Library of Congress in Washington DC and his New York debut at Alice Tully Hall in 1998. Since then he has given recitals in major North American cities, including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2007 he was the violinist in the world premiere of Two Awakenings and a Double Lullaby, written for him by Pulitzer Prize winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis.

Axel Strauss has performed as soloist with orchestras in Budapest, Hamburg, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, Bucharest, San Francisco and Cincinnati, among others, and has toured widely throughout the world as a recitalist and chamber musician. He has also served as guest concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Montreal Symphony. Mr. Strauss also frequently performs at various music festivals in the US. Festival visits abroad have taken him to Germany, India, Korea and Japan. His chamber music partners have included Menahem Pressler, Kim Kashkashian, Joel Krosnick, Robert Mann and Bernhard Greenhouse.

Since his European debut in Hamburg in 1988, Axel Strauss has been heard on concert stages throughout Europe. He has given concerts in Moscow, Vilnius, Berlin, Bremen, Leipzig and Nuremberg. Concert tours have taken him to Armenia, Azerbaijan and Romania. He has also toured South America and performed in Japan with the Philharmonic Violins Berlin.

At the age of seventeen he won the silver medal at the Enescu Competition in Romania and has been recognized with many other awards, including top prizes in the Bach, Wieniawski and Kocian competitions. Mr. Strauss studied at the Music Academies of Lübeck and Rostock with Petru Munteanu. In 1996 he began working with the late Dorothy DeLay at The Juilliard School and became her teaching assistant in 1998. He has also worked with such artists as Itzhak Perlman, Felix Galimir, and Ruggiero Ricci, and at the Marlboro Music Festival with Richard Goode, Mitsuko Uchida and Andras Schiff. Mr. Strauss has been residing in the United States since 1996.

In 2013, Axel Strauss was appointed Professor of Violin at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montreal. Prior to that he served as Professor of Violin at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Victor Fournelle-Blain
The versatile violinist and violist Victor Fournelle-Blain leads an active career as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player. Associate Principal Viola of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, he also teaches viola at McGill University and orchestral studies at Université de Montréal. After studying violin at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal under Johanne Arel, he went on to work with Ani Kavafian at the Yale School of Music, and subsequently joined the class of André Roy as a viola student at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. Winner of McGill’s 2014 Golden Violin Award, the 2012 Prix d’Europe, and Second Prize winner of the 2010 OSM Competition, Victor Fournelle-Blain has performed as a guest soloist with various orchestras including the Orchestre Métropolitain and the Orchestre symphonique de Longueuil. As violinist of the Grand-Duc Trio, he regularly collaborates with renowned musicians including Charles Richard-Hamelin, Andrew Wan and Brian Manker. Victor Fournelle-Blain currently plays a violin by Carlo Tononi and a viola by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, both generously loaned to him by Canimex.

Yegor Dyachkov
Lauded for his remarkable stage presence, depth of insight, nuance and generosity, cellist Yegor Dyachkov is an inspired recitalist, chamber musician and concerto soloist. Since being proclaimed Artist of the Year by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in 2000, Mr. Dyachkov has gone on to perform throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada and the United States, making his New York debut at Lincoln Center in October 2000. He has appeared with major orchestras in such cities as Antwerp, Geneva, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto and Vancouver, and has performed at numerous international festivals in Évian, Kronberg, Lanaudière, Ottawa, Seattle and Tanglewood.

Deeply committed to chamber music, Yegor Dyachkov has performed with the Arditti, Borromeo and St. Lawrence Quartets, pianists Jean Saulnier, John Lenehan, Martin Roscoe, Anton Kuerti, Stéphane Lemelin and Marc-André Hamelin, violinists James Clark, Jonathan Crow, Antje Weithaas, Scott St. John, Andrew Wan and Yehonatan Berick, cellists Steven Isserlis and Colin Carr, and clarinetists James Campbell and Todd Palmer. He was part of Triple Forte for ten years until 2015 and is a member the Magellan Ensemble and of the Montreal Piano Trio.

Winning the Orford International Competition in 1997 led to an invitation from the Chandos label to record his debut CD featuring Glazunov’s Concerto Ballata. He subsequently made several critically acclaimed recordings on the Analekta, Brioso, Atma, Doberman-Yppan and CBC/Riche-Lieu labels.

A champion of new music, Mr. Dyachkov was soloist for the first French performance of Giya Kancheli’s Diplipito at the Evian Festival and for the North American premiere in Winnipeg. He is also the dedicatee of works by Michael Oesterle, Jacques Hétu, André Prévost and Ana Sokolovic. He was invited by Yo-Yo Ma and Sony Music to take part in the Silk Road Project.

Mr. Dyachkov studied with Aleksandr Fedorchenko in Moscow, Yuli Turovsky in Montréal and Boris Pergamenschikow in Cologne. He also had the opportunity to work with Mstislav Rostropovich, André Navarra, David Geringas and Frans Helmersson. Mr. Dyachkov teaches at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, and at l’Université de Montréal.

Ilya Poletaev
A musician with a fiercely inquisitive mind, impeccable technique and an intensely poetic vision, Ilya Poletaev is an artist equally at home on the modern piano or on historical keyboards: harpsichord, fortepiano, and chamber organ. Hailed as “one of the most significant pianists of his generation” by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he launched his career after capturing First Prize at the prestigious International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig in 2010 -- the only Canadian ever to win that competition. He has since appeared at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, KlavierFestival Ruhr, Dresdner MusikFesttäge, Potsdam Musikfestspiele, Leipzig BachFest, Accademia Filarmonica Romana, Montreal Bach Festival, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center and Chamber Music Society, St. Paul’s Ordway Center, Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, Caramoor Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and many other prestigious venues and festivals across Canada, US, Italy, Romania, Germany, and Russia. He also was the Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Concorso Sala Gallo in Italy, a laureate of the 2008 Canadian Stepping Stone, a top prize-winner at the 2007 SEHKS harpsichord competition, and a prize-winner at the 2011 George Enescu Competition in Bucharest. In 2009 he joined the roster of Astral Artists and is currently an Astral Artist laureate.

On the modern piano, he has appeared with the Toronto Symphony, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Hartford Symphony, Moscow State Symphony Orchestra, Samara Philharmonic, Sinfonia Toronto, Orchestra Filarmonica di Cluj, Orchestra Filarmonica de Bacau, and McGill Symphony Orchestra collaborating with such conductors as David Robertson, Peter Oundjian, Bernhard Gueller, Alexis Hauser, Rossen Milanov, Nurhan Arman, John Holloway and Leo Kraemer.

Known for the breadth and creativity of his programming choices, Poletaev has in past seasons offered solo performances ranging from the complete 2nd Book of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (which he performs in its entirety on both modern and historical keyboards); to traditional recitals and concerto performances of both well-known and neglected repertoire (C.P.E. Bach, Dussek, Medtner, Enescu, Nielsen, etc.), to inter-disciplinary events combining performances on different instruments, poetry readings, spoken commentary, and historical narrative.

In performing Baroque and Classical repertoire on the modern piano, an area in which he is well-known, Ilya Poletaev strives to bring together a personal vision and wide palette of instrumental colors with the most scrupulous attention to sources and historical performance techniques. “An expert harpsichordist, he played Bach on the piano as well as any I have heard…All that he played was deeply considered…His intelligence was luminous.”(Berkshire Eagle). “The Bach Overture was set forth with delightfully springy rhythms, a constantly stimulating interplay of contrapuntal lines, and tone that was clear and warm with no suspicion of harshness. Stylish as it was, with intricately detailed embellishments, this was also romantic playing.” (Seen and Heard International).

In his interpretations of the traditional Romantic literature, Mr. Poletaev combines the improvisatory flexibility derived from his experience with period performance practice with psychological insight and a gift for large-scale musical narrative. Of a recent performance of Schumann’s Humoreske, a critic wrote: “There was no attempt to sand down Schumann's jagged edges, to soften the blows of sudden changes in thought and mood. Through a liberal amount of rhythmic distortion, Poletaev revealed the wonderful truth in Schumann's anxieties, obsessions, and wild tangents -- that his was a reality apart. Resolution (sanity) was all the more sweet in the penultimate section, which the pianist rendered in the most tender shades of sincerity.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)

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