Melos Quartet

The Melos Quartet Stuttgart was founded in October 1965 by four young musicians who were members of well-known German chamber orchestras. The name Melos, an ancient Greek word for music which is the root of the word melody, was suggested by the combination of the names Melcher and Voss.

In 1966 the group gave its first recital: won a prize in the Villa-Lobos-Quartet competition at Rio de Janeiro: represented West Germany at the World Congress of Jeuness Musicale in Paris; and, most influentially for their future success, won the 'Prix Américain' as the best quartet, at the Geneva International Congress of Musical Performance. Then, giving up their orchestral positions to concentrate solely on the Quartet, they began touring in 1967 and in 1968 performed in seven European countries. In 1969 they gave 105 concerts throughout the world, and had their first television appearance.

After this they undertook tours around the world, in North and South America, Africa, all European countries, the Near East and Far East, getting as far as Novosibirsk in Russia. They became the first West German musicians to play in Volgograd (Stalingrad), in 1973, in concerts commemorating the events of 1943. By 1975, when the Schubert integral recordings were completed and issued, the Quartet also held a teaching post at the Stuttgart School of Music.

By 1975 the group had built up a repertoire of 120 works, including the complete Beethoven, Schubert, Cherubini and Bartók quartets, and works by Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Pfitzner, Verdi, Donizetti, Debussy, Smetana, Kodály, Janáček, Hindemith, Alban Berg, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Witold Lutosławski, Milko Kelemen, Wittinger and Horvath. They made a conscious decision to have a wide-ranging repertoire in order to avoid getting stuck to any particular period.

For most of the Schubert recordings the instruments were a cello by Francesco Ruggieri (1682), a viola by Carlo Ferdinando Landolfi (18th century), first violin by Domenico Montagnana (1731) and second violin by Carlo Annibale Tononi (18th century).

They were planning a farewell tour in 2005, when Wilhelm Melcher, the first violinist died unexpectedly just before his 65th birthday.

Among others, the Quartet collaborated with Arthur Rubinstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Georg Solti, Narciso Yepes, Piero Farulli and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Wikipedia