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The Wave Quartet came into being when the world-renowned marimba player Bogdan Bácanu was making an adaptation for his instrument of J.S. Bach's three concertos for two harpischords. He teamed up with his former pupil Christoph Sietzen - a prize-winner in the 2014 ARD International Music Competition and a Rising Star of the European Concert Hall Organisation for the 2017-2018 season - and with Emiko Uchiyama and Vladi Petrov, who had won a number of international competitions as a marimba duo.
The ensemble made its debut in 2008 at the Berlin Konzerthaus, performing J.S. Bach's C major concerto (BWV 1061a) in a version for four marimbas. Both the transcription and the performance were praised for respecting Bach’s original score and the spirit of historically informed performance. Since then, the Wave Quartet, placing a special emphasis on Bach and contemporary repertoire, has appeared at such venues as Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus (with the Mozarteum Orchestra) and the Athenaeum Bucharest (with the Romanian National Symphony Orchestra). Concerts and master-classes have taken the Wave Quartet around both Europe and the Far East, a region where the ensemble has enjoyed great success since its early days.
The quartet’s first CD, "Aurora Borealis", released in 2008, was followed in 2009 by a recording, made with Salzburg Barock and conductor Peter Sadlo, of the three Bach concertos that had formed the group’s starting point. Senza Ripieno followed in 2011, a programme of seldom-heard baroque music, performed on an intimate scale. 2016 brought the Genuin Classics release Loco, a programme of tango-infused music by Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel and numbers by the Mexican duo Rodrigo y Gabriela. The quartet returned to J.S. Bach in 2016, collaborating with L'Orfeo Barockorchester, and a recording of the results is scheduled for release on Sony Classical.
Early 2017 brought the world premiere, at the Brucknerhaus in Linz, of Emmanuel Séjourné‘s groundbreaking Gotan Concerto for marimba quartet, percussion and orchestra, a work dedicated to the Wave Quartet. The work features on the album Lauda Concertata, released on Genuin Classics in late 2016.
The members of the Wave Quartet play exclusively on marimbas supplied by Adams Musical Instruments. |
