How would you introduce yourself before a performance?
We are the Fibonacci Quartet (Kryštof Kohout, Luna De Mol, Ami-Louise Johnsson and Kosta Popović). We are an international string quartet that was formed in September 2020 in London, bringing together Czech, Belgian, Swedish and Montenegrin nationalities. We are between the ages of 17 and 20 and all of us are currently studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where we are being coached and mentored by the wonderful Krysia Osostowicz.
· How did you come to play together?
We met at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama where we all started studying in September. Early on we all attended a “chamber music speed dating” event at the school, where the idea was to play with as many different people as possible for a short amount of time, and hopefully find a group you clicked with. This was where we first played with each other. Three of us have the same individual teacher, so we knew of each other beforehand and had actually discussed forming a chamber music ensemble together already. This proved to be a great idea as we immediately had a wonderful connection, especially while playing but definitely also outside of that. We had a few very productive, fulfilling rehearsals with just the three of us, and not too much later we found our cellist Kosta who ended up completing our quartet!
· Who would you most like to collaborate with?
There are so many ensembles that we enjoy listening to and would love to play with one day, and so many incredible musicians that we greatly look up to. If we had to pick one now, it would be the Pavel Haas Quartet! We make sure to attend their concerts whenever they are in London and it is always so inspiring to see how wonderfully they work together as an ensemble and how beautifully they respond to each other while each one of them still puts so much of their own character and individuality into the performance. We have had some incredible conversations with them about quartet playing and music in general, and it really is a dream of ours to play an octet with them someday, although we’d be amazingly happy with a masterclass as well!
· What has been your favourite of your performances so far?
We have very fond memories of our performance at the Beethoven Competition for Young Musicians in London. It was our very first public performance, and the audience as well as the organisation and judges were so incredibly warm and supportive. We also met some wonderful musicians from various nationalities who were students and alumni from all London conservatoires. As it was our very first concert and the age limit for the competition was 26 (we were ages 17-19 at the time, the very youngest competitors!), we did not realistically expect anything. Imagine our surprise and joy when we were awarded both the first prize and the audience prize! It was a beautiful, proud evening for us filled with fantastic music and incredible people.
· What is the best advice you’ve been given as a musician or performer?
Always be open to others interpretations, even if you are fully convinced of your own. (About playing chamber music).
· What music is inspiring you right now?
During the lockdown we have been studying a lot of Haydn and Mozart quartets, which has been so incredibly interesting and helpful! These works are truly the basis for all later quartet music, and it has been so great exploring the structure and dynamics within. Simultaneously we have been preparing to play Shostakovich’s ninth quartet (among others) when we finally have the chance to play together again, and we are all so intrigued and captivated by his music, and the enormous contrasts but also the unexpected similarities between these vastly different works. We truly love all sorts and types of music and are often very quick to change favourites, as we tend to fall in love with almost any piece we newly discover or sight read at one of the sight reading sessions we regularly hold to get more familiar with the string quartet repertoire. There is such an endless amount of beautiful music out there, and nothing stopping us from being inspired by all of it!
· Have you been making music during lockdown? If yes, what have you been doing?
All of us have online lessons and seminars with our teachers and each of us has to do a lot of recording. This is quite doable separately, but making music with multiple people this way gets very complicated, both live and pre-recorded. Suffering from a severe lack of playing with people in real time, we did make an attempt at rehearsing through Zoom. After that slightly chaotic and noisy experience, we decided to instead switch to remote recordings and edit them together. This is however not at all the same as you are not actually playing together this way, but rather separately recording single parts and putting them together after. Therefore the very core aspect of quartet playing -playing together, really connecting with the music and each other- falls away. So yes, we have done numerous efforts to try and find a decent remote alternative, and the conclusion is we really can’t wait to actually get together again, live!
· What’s been the hardest thing about lockdown for you as a musician?
For us it was obviously very tough to not be able to play together at all throughout the whole duration of the lockdown, as we all reside in different countries (Czech Republic, Belgium, Sweden, Montenegro). Even though we tried to compensate by studying scores, listening to, comparing and analysing recordings, picking new repertoire and learning our parts individually, not being able to share music with each other has been a gigantic void in our daily life and we have and continue to greatly miss it and each other. Making music with other people is one of the most vital, magical parts of being a musician and not being able to do so for such a long time is extremely frustrating and saddening.
· What’s been the best thing about lockdown for you as a musician?
The fact that there is time! Normally we are all extremely busy with classes, rehearsals, concerts,... For the first and probably last time in our lives, all of us had a completely empty agenda for several months. This was an exceptional opportunity for all sorts of things: fixing some technical issues perhaps, learning a great amount of new repertoire (both solo and chamber music), simply being able to focus on individual practice. Anything really: whatever you had planned to do someday but never found the time for, you finally had the opportunity to do! Time is one of the most precious things in life, especially for musicians, so the one positive thing about this awful situation was definitely the gift of that.
· What’s next for you?
We are hoping to be able to get together and rehearse again as soon as possible! We are all incredibly excited to learn a lot of new repertoire and just finally be able to enjoy playing together again. We are very eager to learn more, discover more and experience more, and hopefully we’ll be able to reschedule all the concerts we sadly weren’t able to perform. We want to get back to “normal” preferably yesterday and can’t wait to grow and develop further as a quartet and sense the beauty of chamber music again!
· Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?
We are hoping to establish ourselves as a quartet, and are mainly excited to meet and collaborate with lots of interesting people from all over the world and get involved with all sorts of chamber music projects in the future. We are very much looking forward to performing as much as possible in the coming years and presenting the wonderful chamber music repertoire to wide audiences.