Dudok Quartet spans five centuries with passion and precision

Sat Jan 25, 2025 at 1:09 pm

By Jared Hackworth

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam performed at the Winter Chamber Music Festival Friday night in Evanston. Photo: Wendy Liu


It’s not very often that a string quartet offers music from five centuries on one program; still less so when they perform each period with consistently artful precision, attentive listening, and a yearning spirit. 

The Dudok Quartet Amsterdam, in their only American concert of the year, surveyed the musical canon Friday night, arranging vocal madrigals and piano preludes for the string quartet, performing a Chicago premiere of a new work, and presenting an enlivening performance of canonical classics. They also perform standing, except for cellist David Faber

This was the third appearance at Northwestern’s Winter Chamber Music Festival for the quartet, which is comprised of violinists Judith van Driel and Marleen Wester, violist Marie-Louise de Jong, and Faber.

The emotional center of the program came after intermission, with Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 3 in E Minor. 

With a sweeping abandon, the Dudok members played with beautifully plucked strings, immense dynamic contrast, and a smooth juggling of complex melodic lines. Van Driel described the piece’s style as holding the dramatic force of an opera in the first and third movements, contrasted with the short and light ballet of the second and fourth. 

The musicians delivered on this stylistic versatility; especially moving was the mournful, dirge-like third movement. Tchaikovsky dedicated the quartet in memory of his deceased friend, the violinist Ferdinand Laub, and this interpretation felt like a new discovery, with every measure marked by technical prowess and heartfelt melancholy. They played just as Tchaikovsky may have felt, yearning for a transcendence that may never arrive.  

Dudok’s selection from Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes for Piano matched the Tchaikovsky’s vigor and heart. The ensemble is not new to quartet arrangements of other repertoire, having performed some at their 2020 appearance. This arrangement of Shostakovich was a collage of brief interludes. Each selection danced around the room like a flash of light—quickly appearing, fully breathing, and departing with grace before one realized it was finished. The arrangements, done by the cellist Faber, honor each player as a collaborator in their own right, building a texture together instead of featuring a star soloist.

The most recent piece on the program, Three Tributes by El-Turk was written for the group in 2024. While the other pieces showed the history of the string quartet, this piece showed its future. As the instrumentalists walked onto the stage in darkness, the piece began amid humming and speaking. Suddenly, as the lights rose, the piece jumped into forceful sforzandos from the strings. Packed to the brim with sliding tonality, the piece radiated energy like a hornet’s nest.

Three Tributes gestured towards the genre’s future, using prerecorded tracks layered over the live musicians, creating a cacophony of force akin to an air raid siren. Dudok makes a case for this stylistic hybrid that expanded the group to a quintet with a ghostly member.

The opening two works, an arrangement of Gesualdo’s 17th-century madrigal “Deh, come invan sospiro” and Haydn’s String Quartet in G Minor, were not quite on the same level, with little dynamic contrast and a lack of precise rhythms.

Still, the Dudok Quartet vitality breathed a vitality into Tchaikovsky, El-Turk, and Shostakovich that was transfixing. 

The Winter Chamber Music Festival concludes 3 p.m. Sunday with the Miro Quartet performing music of Haydn, Walker, Shaw and Beethoven. music.northwestern.edu

Jared Hackworth is a writer, teacher, and researcher. He is completing his Ph.D. in English at the University of Illinois Chicago, where he teaches composition, research writing, and American literature. His music reviews have appeared in the Boston Music Intelligencer, and he works with the school of The New York Times.

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