The young Austrian string quartet QuarTête à Tête performed the following three concerts: on 11 December at St Georges Basilica, Victoria, Gozo, on 12 December at Bir Miftuh and on 13 December at Sala Isouard in Valletta. These events were made possible by the Austrian Embassy in collaboration with St Georges Basilica, Malta International Airport and Friends of the Manoel Theatre.

QuarTête à Tête was founded by four excellent young musicians in 2005. All of them students at Austrian universities or academies of music, they are specialised in chamber music and their repertoire ranges from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Dmitri Schostakowitsch and from Antonín Dvorak to Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.

The members of the quartet are Clemens Flieder (violin), Bernhard Winkler (violin), Sascha Akbarian (viola) und Lucy Cotton (cello) – all of them winners of several competitions, among them La Prima Musica Festival. The programme they presented in Malta and Gozo to delighted audiences, centred around Josef Haydn whose 200th death anniversary will be celebrated this year. Contrasting this “classic” programme, one short piece by Anton von Webern, one of the best-known proponents of the twelve-tone technique, was performed as well.