Asasello-Quartett

Rostislav Kozhevnikov, Violin
Barbara Streil, Violin
Justyna Śliwa, Viola
Teemu Myöhänen, Cello

“Only those who use a track can derail, not those who lay one.” This quote by Arnold Schoenberg sums up, in one sentence, the credo of our quartet. Complete recordings of the string quartets by Arnold Schoenberg (2016) and Dmitri Shostakovich (2022–2024), being often-used tracks, are an exception in the Asasello’s rail network.

Our discography featuring a selected repertoire of new music mainly came about in cooperation with Deutschlandfunk. A large number of commissions and collaborations with other artists and arts have been supported from the outset by foundations and public bodies, and the Quartet has repeatedly undertaken adventurous journeys into uncharted territory. Of course, our artistic life is not completely free of compromises, but the greatest possible independence and self-reliance have seemed to us to be essential features of the Quartet since its inception.

After all, we weren’t obliged to call ourselves Asasello, after the demon in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita from the 1920s, who can hardly be considered a particularly sympathetic figure. He’s not attractive either. But he knows. This aspiration, the conviction that we as artists are responsible for what we do, keeps us on our toes.

So far we have never sought comfort in the choice of our repertoire. Classical training with the best of the profession (Walter Levin, Alban Berg Quartet, Chaim Taub) and a profound engagement with contemporary compositions and composers are at odds with an attitude of snug complacency. Internal, economic, and recently also political pressures do influence us, but we are least spared the “national idea”: with Rostislav Kozhevnikov (Russia/Germany), Barbara Streil (Switzerland), Justyna Sliwa (Poland), and Teemu Myöhänen (Finland), since 2004 in our adopted country of Germany, we are constantly engaging with different nationalities anyway.

Photography: Wolfgang Burat

The artist's homepage:

https://www.asasello-quartett.eu