Germany's Minguet Quartett, comprising violinists Ulrich Isfort and Annette Reisinger, violist Aroa Sorin, and cellist Matthias Diener, allocates its concert programs and recorded output between Romantic works, with occasional excursions into Classical-era pieces, and a substantial body of contemporary scores. Its discography has appeared on several specialized German labels renowned for refined engineering.
Formed in 1988, the ensemble adopted its title from the eighteenth-century Spanish composer, musicologist, engraver, and aesthetic thinker Pablo Minguet y Yrol, who championed wide public access to the arts. In a notable contrast, much of the quartet's energy has been devoted to complex scores typically reserved for expert listeners. During the twenty-first century it has commissioned and given first performances of numerous new compositions. One prominent undertaking involved a staged presentation of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Helikopter-Streichquartett under the direction of conductor Kent Nagano. By the 2017 and 2018 seasons the group was performing in leading halls across Germany and abroad, among them the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie, and the Library of Congress in Washington. Regular participants in German festivals such as the Mozartfest Würzburg and the Beethovenfest in Bonn, the quartet has also traveled throughout continental Europe, Britain, North and South America, and Japan. Its artistic partners have included mezzo-soprano Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, clarinetists Matthias Schorn and Thorsten Johanns, pianists Michael Korstick and Matthias Kirschnereit, and bandoneonist Victor Villena.
Especially noteworthy is the breadth of its recorded legacy, which commenced in 1996 with Othmar Schoeck's quartets on the audiophile MDG imprint and has shown a consistent emphasis on German composers. The ensemble produced the first integral sets of the string quartets by Jörg Widmann, Peter Ruzicka, and Wolfgang Rihm. It has likewise issued complete traversals of the quartets by Josef Suk and by Brahms's Romantic contemporary Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Releases have appeared on Col Legno, the label for its Rihm cycle, as well as on CPO, Neos, Wergo, and additional imprints. In 2018 the quartet issued a CPO album of Mendelssohn quartets that encompassed the composer's youthful 1823 work, and it completed a survey of Robert Fuchs's quartets the same year. Returning on ECM in 2021, the musicians contributed to Konstantia Gourzi's multi-ensemble piece Anájikon. Future plans include a recording of Glenn Gould's seldom-heard String Quartet in F minor, Op. 1.
