The Musical Instrument Fund
provides EnAccord with a unique
set of quartet instruments
In 2008, the Musical Instrument Fund was able to fulfill an important wish: assembling a high-quality quartet of instruments. The musicians in a quartet must understand, sense, complement, and balance one another, while each individual’s personality must remain intact. The same applies to the instruments. Flexibility was a key guiding principle in selecting the four instruments for a quartet.
Thanks to the generous support of the Louisa van der Velden Foundation, the Musical Instrument Fund was able to acquire four instruments from the 19th-century French school: two violins and a viola by J.B. Vuillaume, and a cello by Pierre & Hippolyte Silvestre. The four instruments were built over a period of 38 years, between 1829 and 1867, and were loaned in early 2009 to a young and promising quartet, the EnAccord String Quartet.
The Netherlands-based EnAccord String Quartet, founded in 1998 in connection with the Orlando Festival, consists of musicians who graduated from the conservatories in The Hague and Amsterdam.
Between 2003 and 2006, the quartet studied at the Dutch String Quartet Academy with Stefan Metz and took master classes with members of renowned quartets, such as the Amadeus Quartet, the Borodin Quartet, the Kronos Quartet (in New York), Quatuor Mosaïques, and the Takács Quartet (in the Kleine Zaal of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam). They are being coached by the Alban Berg Quartet at the Cologne University of Music.
The EnAccord String Quartet won prizes at the Princess Christina Competition, the International Charles Hennen Competition, the Vriendenkrans Competition, and the National Chamber Music Competition in Almere. In 2008, the Kersjes Fund awarded an additional grant for a string quartet to the EnAccord String Quartet.
The quartet works to develop as broad a repertoire as possible and strives to include a combination of traditional quartet repertoire and lesser-known masterpieces in its programming. In addition to concerts in the Netherlands, the EnAccord Quartet regularly performs abroad. They have performed in Amman, Budapest, Geneva, Istanbul, and at Carnegie Hall in New York.
With the purchase of this quartet, the Musical Instrument Fund underscores the importance it places on supporting young string quartets in the Netherlands. The Musical Instrument Fund has already loaned instruments to countless string quartets in the Netherlands, thereby helping them develop their careers. Among the quartets supported by the Musical Instrument Fund are the Allegra Quartet, the Faisca Quartet, the Jenufa Quartet, the Matangi Quartet, the Rubens Quartet, the Red Limo String Quartet, the Van Dingstee Quartet, and the Zephyr Quartet.