Borletti-Buitoni Trust
BBT Artists Rewarding Musical Excellence
Quartetto Lyskamm
String Quartet
BBT Special Chamber Music Award 2016

Quartetto Lyskamm - Biography

Quartetto Lyskamm was supported by BBT between 2016 and 2019.  For an up-to-date biography go to www.quartettolyskamm.it

BBT Special Chamber Music Prize In Honour of Claudio Abbado

Cecilia Ziano violin
Clara Franziska Schötensack violin
Francesca Piccioni viola
Giorgio Casati cello

Quartetto Lyskamm was founded in 2008 at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatoire of Milan. It was awarded the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Special Chamber Music Prize in Honour of Claudio Abbado in 2016.

Prizes since 2014 include the first prize at the Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award in Lugano, the second prize and the ProQuartet special prize at the  Franz Schubert und die Musik der Moderne in Graz international competition, the Jeunesse Musicale Deutschland prize at the International Chamber Music Campus in Weikersheim, the Possehl Stiftung award and the Vittorio Rimbotti award of the European Chamber Music Academy.

Quartetto Lyskamm has performed for such seasons as the Società del Quartetto of Milano, the MiTo Festival, Rheingau Musik Festival, the Brahms Festival in Luebeck, the ProQuartet, the Unione Musicale and the Lingotto Musica of Turin, the Amici della Musica of Florence, and Musica Insieme Bologna. It has been quartet in residence at the Padua’s Amici della Musica and at the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. In January 2016, the Quartet was guest artist at Aldeburgh Music.

Recent collaborators have included fellow Italians cellist Mario Brunello, percussionist Simone Rubino* and pianists Gabriele Carcano* and Alessandro Taverna. Experimenting with different set-ups of performances where literature and music interact, Quartetto Lyskamm built a project together with the actor Giuseppe Cederna. Furthermore, since the very beginning it was a mission of the quartet to meet schools of any level and creating a relationship with the audience.

Quartetto Lyskamm was supported by Amici del Quartetto di Reggio Emilia, Cidim – Comitato Nazionale Italiano Musica and by the Ad Infinitum Foundation.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Quartet was mentored by the Artemis Quartet, before joining the European Chamber Music Academy circuit, meeting important teachers such as Hatto Beyerle, Johannes Meissl, Heime Müller (studying with him at the Musikhochschule Lübeck), Antonello Farulli, Claus Christian Schuster, Jérôme Pernoo, Christophe Giovaninetti and Andrea Nannoni. Further collaborations have been with Christophe Coin, Eberhard Felz, Ferenc Rados and the members of Cuarteto Casals*.

In January 2019 the Quartet’s debut recording of Bartók’s Fourth and Sixth Quartets was released on Amadeus.

* fellow BBT alumni

Last updated: November 2020

If there is one key quality a young quartet needs in order to grow and develop, it is trust and confidence in the ability to discover its identity. With the Borletti Buitoni family, we learnt that Trust is not just a word, but a real tangible support on so many levels. We received this award without needing to apply or convince anyone of our total commitment to the project and since then the trust in our work has helped us make real what was just a dream before.

Photographs by Christian Ruvolo