Two musical encounters between four composers who have never met. The Calder Quartet bridges the ocean and brings two contemporaries together – twice: Mathilde Wantenaar and Paul Wiancko (the present) and Charles Ives and Henriëtte Bosmans (a hundred years ago). Bound by time but separated by continents — can that be heard in their music?

In this programme the Calder Quartet gives the world premières of the latest string quartets by Wiancko and Wantenaar — for Mathilde Wantenaar her first string quartet. In addition they play Charles Ives and Henriëtte Bosmans, roughly contemporaries of each other in the first half of the previous century. The different environments in which Ives and Bosmans found themselves is unmistakable: Bosmans’ impressionist quartet depicts a turbulent summer by the sea, Ives created a musical collage by stacking American melodies, like skyscrapers, on top of each other. And yet… Somewhere at the core there seems to be a hint of shared aesthetic or zeitgeist.