The Inextinguishable Route — ADDA·Simfònica Alicante META4 QUARTET, String Quartet Josep Vicent, Principal Director

NICOLA CAMPOGRANDE. Composer

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1969, Nicola Campogrande is considered one of the most important Italian composers today. Since 2017, his music has been published exclusively by Breitkopf & Härtel. After graduating from the conservatories of Milan and Paris, he began developing a personal and original style, blending past and present traditions into a new and fascinating path. His scores have been performed by musicians such as Gautier Capuçon, Riccardo Chailly, Lilya Zilberstein, Mario Brunello, Roberto Abbado, Josep Vicent, The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, The Orchestre National d’Île-de-France, ADDA SIMFÓNICA ALICANTE, the Fine Arts Quartet, and the Quartetto del Teatro alla Scala, all of whom have appreciated the freshness and vitality of his music, as well as its ability to touch listeners' hearts. His works are recorded on over 35 albums—from DECCA to independent labels—and frequently performed in leading concert halls such as London's Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall, Teatro alla Scala, the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège, Werner Hall in Cincinnati, the Philharmonic and UNESCO Auditorium in Paris, the Auditorio Santa Cecilia—Parco della Musica in Rome, and the Rudolfinum in Prague.

Artistic director of the "MITO SettembreMusica" festival, Campogrande is also a presenter for RAI Radio3 in Italy and produced the television program "Contrappunti" on the Classica HD channel. He writes for the cultural pages of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera and has served on juries.

META4 QUARTET. String Quartet

Founded in 2001, Meta4 is one of Finland’s most internationally successful string quartets. In 2004, it won first prize at the International Shostakovich Quartet Competition in Moscow and received a special award for best interpretation of Shostakovich. The quartet continued its success in 2007, winning first prize at the Joseph Haydn International Chamber Music Competition in Vienna. Later that year, the Finnish Minister of Culture awarded Meta4 the Finlandia Prize in recognition of its international impact. Meta4 was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist for 2008–2010, and in 2013, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation granted the quartet a special award for its work.

Meta4 regularly performs in major musical capitals and key concert venues worldwide, including Wiener Konzerthaus, Wigmore Hall, and King’s Place in London, Madrid’s National Auditorium, Cité de la Musique in Paris, and Stockholms Konserthus, and has toured Australia. In Finland, the quartet served as artistic director of the Oulunsalo Soi festival from 2008 to 2011 and was quartet-in-residence at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival from 2008 to 2017. More recently, Meta4 was principal guest quartet with the Jyväskylä Symphony Orchestra during the 2022–2024 seasons. The quartet studied at the European Chamber Music Academy (ECMA) with Hatto Beyerle and Johannes Meissl.

The quartet also maintains an intense discography. Meta4 has released three recordings with Hänssler Classics: Haydn’s String Quartets Op. 55 Nos. 1–3 (2009), which received the prestigious Echo Klassik award in 2010; Shostakovich’s Quartets Nos. 3, 4, and 7 (2012), awarded both YLE’s Album of the Year (Finnish National Radio) and the Emma Prize (Finland’s Grammy) for Best Classical Album of the Year; and Bartók’s Quartets Nos. 1 and 5 (2014).

Additionally, the quartet released a recording of Kaija Saariaho’s chamber music on Ondine (2013) and a vinyl record of Sibelius’s String Quartet “Voces Intimae” on Berliner Meister Schallplatten (2013). In 2019, ECM Records released an album featuring Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet and Gérard Pesson’s Nebenstück, in collaboration with clarinetist Reto Bieri.

Recent releases on BIS include Octets (March 2020), a collaboration with the Gringolts Quartet featuring works by Felix Mendelssohn and George Enescu, and Oceano (October 2021), with chamber music by Sebastian Fagerlund. Their latest release, Tales from Norway, featuring works by Krishna Nagarajan, was issued in spring 2022 by Challenge Classics and was nominated for the Emma Award as Classical Album of the Year.

The members of Meta4 perform on instruments of exceptional quality, including a Stradivarius violin kindly loaned by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, a Carlo Bergonzi violin provided by the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation, and a cello by Lorenzo Storioni made in Cremona in 1780.