Biography

Mandelring Quartett

Sebastian Schmidt, violin
Nanette Schmidt, violin
Andreas Willwohl, viola
Bernhard Schmidt, cello

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“Glorious poetry in sound”. Thus wrote the leading Spanish cultural magazine Scherzo after a concert by the Mandelring Quartet in Madrid.

This ensemble, founded in 1983, won some major competitions including ARD’s International Music Competition and the Premio Paolo Borciani, and this led to concert tours to numerous international musical centres. Their concert diary regularly features tours in various European countries as well as to North and South America and Asia. They are also warmly welcomed guests at leading festivals such as the Schwarzenberg and Hohensems Schubertiades, the Lower Rhine Music Festival, the Ludwigsburg Castle Festival, the Festival Internacional de Música De Marvao and the Kuhmo Chamber Music

The HambacherMusikFest, created by the Mandelring Quartet in 1997 in their home town of Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, has become a meeting point for lovers of chamber music from all over the globe. Since 2010 the ensemble has been arranging its own concert series both in Neustadt and in the Berliner Philharmonie.

The Mandelring Quartet has several times performed cycles of the complete chamber music for strings of Mendelssohn and Brahms. It has also performed all fifteen Shostakovich string quartets at the Salzburg festival and in Berlin, as well as in its role of Quartet in Residence for the 2020/21 season in the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. In the spring of 2023 the ensemble was, for the fourth time, privileged to be invited to perform in the Spanish Royal Palace in Madrid using Stradivari instruments from the royal collection.

Numerous CD recordings by the Mandelring Quartet have received the German Record Critics’ Prize, nominations for the International Classical Music Awards, and further prizes, all testifying to its outstanding quality and exceptionally wide-ranging repertoire. Its recording of the complete Shostakovich quartets and of Mendelssohn’s complete chamber music for strings, have aroused great interest internationally and have indeed come to be regarded by eminent critics as the benchmark recordings of these works. Most recent releases are the CD “Pennies from Heaven”, featuring selected encore pieces, and a double set presenting items from the French repertoire: quartets by Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy along with works by their contemporaries Fernand de la Tombelle and Jean Rivier.