Hagen Quartet

The roots of the Hagen Quartet reach back to the 1970s, when the four children of the Salzburg violist Oskar Hagen came together as an ensemble. They made their debut in 1980 at the International Music Weeks Lucerne, as Lucerne Festival was known at the time. The quartet, however, dates its official “birth” to the summer of 1981, when Gidon Kremer invited the young ensemble to his chamber music festival in Lockenhaus. Numerous successes at competitions followed in the ensuing years, along with invitations to the world’s leading festivals and major concert halls. The repertoire of the Hagen Quartet, which has performed in its current lineup since 1987, is broad in scope and encompasses the entire history of the genre, from works by Haydn to the present day. Of central importance was the ensemble’s collaboration with figures such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt and György Kurtág, as well as joint performances with Sabine Meyer, Maurizio Pollini, Heinrich Schiff, Mitsuko Uchida, Jörg Widmann, and Krystian Zimerman. In 2011, the “Hagens,” who were, and in some cases remain, members of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, were featured as “artistes étoiles” at the Lucerne Summer Festival. The Vienna Konzerthaus named the ensemble an honorary member in 2012, and in 2019 it received the Concertgebouw Prijs. The Hagen Quartet has released nearly 50 CDs — most recently, in 2023, a recording of clarinet quintets by Mozart and Widmann. At the conclusion of the 2025-26 season, the Hagen Quartet will conclude its concert career; this evening marks its final appearance in Switzerland.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 23 August 1980 in quartets by Joseph Haydn, Antónin Dvořák, and Graz˙yna Bacewicz.

January 2026