‘Dissonance …’ Quatuor Ébène second violinist Gabriel Le Magadure articulates the nickname of Mozart’s String Quartet No 19 in C slowly, reflectively – clearly evoking old memories. ‘ARD International Music Competition, 2004. Final round. We were practising a lot, but we were working through a lot of technical quartet things at the time, and to play it naturally was not natural for us. Then suddenly, just at the right moment, we played it as we wanted.’

It’s the afternoon of October 6, 2023, and I’m sitting with Le Magadure and his three Quatuor Ébène colleagues in their dressing room at the Bosco Kulturhaus in Gauting, Bavaria – that is, just half an hour’s drive away from Munich, where 19 years ago that major ARD win launched this now-world-famous French quartet’s international career overnight. Also, it’s just two days since it carried off its fourth Gramophone Award, precisely for Mozart – the K515 and K516 string quintets in partnership with fellow 2004 ARD winner the viola player Antoine Tamestit. So while tonight’s programme features Haydn’s Sun String Quartet in G minor, Bartók’s String Quartet No 3 and Schubert’s String Quartet No 15 in G, while my visit is actually tied to their forthcoming jazz album, ‘Milestones’, and while we’re planning to do the interview proper tomorrow in Munich itself (where the quartet now gives a class at the University of Music and Theatre), I’ve ended up switching the dictaphone on early to capture what is a rather touching moment of reflection, as Le Magadure and founder first violinist Pierre Colombet describe how Mozart is the very composer for which their younger competition selves would never even have dreamed of winning a Gramophone Award.

The thing about the Ébène, though, is that it needs only the smallest of side-shimmies to steer this article back to the album in hand, jazz arrangements and improvisations having been so integral to the quartet’s DNA – and thus present at its many career-shaping ‘milestones’ – ever since its foundation in 1999 at the suburban-Paris conservatoire of Boulogne-Billancourt. In fact, that the quartet should remain open to jazz and other genres was even cellist Raphaël Merlin’s precondition for joining, jazz pianist that he also is. By the time of the ARD, jamming sessions had become a valuable means of letting off steam from a practice regime that could stretch to 11 hours a day. Even their mentor the revered chamber pedagogue Eberhard Feltz (to whom they’d been introduced in 2002 by their teachers the Ysaÿe Quartet) declared these non-classical muscles to be ‘a useful extra string to your bow – as long as you continue to play well and to practise the Beethoven opus 18 quartets’.

Fast-forward to 2009, when the quartet picked up its first and second Gramophone Awards in one fell swoop (Chamber category and Recording of the Year) for its Debussy, Fauré and Ravel quartets, and Mathieu Herzog (the viola player at the time) quipped that they now wouldn’t be back for some time, because the next album was of jazz and pop arrangements. We all laughed. But when ‘Fiction’ was released (2010), it turned out to be no bland crossover product angling for the mass-market dollar, but a fizzingly classy offering whose arrangements, from Nat King Cole to Bruce Springsteen, honed on stage as encores and after-hours sets, demonstrated a jazz voice every bit as sleekly sharp-edged and distinctive as the quartet’s classical one – Merlin using his cello as a double bass, Colombet’s violin improvisations nearing what would typically be heard from a jazz trumpeter or saxophonist, and all four not just playing but also singing. Onwards, and punctuating recordings of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Haydn came ‘Brazil’ (2014; a multicultural exploration of bossa nova and samba with singer-songwriter Bernard Lavilliers and American jazz singer Stacey Kent, among others) and ‘Eternal Stories’ (2017; a tango-shaped collaboration with Michel Portal, with Herzog now gone to pursue conducting, replaced by Adrien Boisseau).

Quatuor Ébène (photography: Julien Mignot)

As the quartet celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2019-20 with a worldwide, live-recorded tour of the complete Beethoven quartets (current viola player Marie Chilemme newly in the viola chair but sounding as though she’d been there forever), one of the most striking moments shared on social media was a video of the four of them, Merlin at the piano, swinging for all they were worth at a jamming session in an African bar.

Then in 2022 came the third Gramophone Award (Chamber), this one actually for jazz: ‘’Round Midnight’, a nocturnal-themed programme with Antoine Tamestit and cellist Nicolas Altstaedt featuring Merlin’s own brand-new sextet on four jazz standards, Night Bridge, acting as a musical bridge between Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the quartet’s jazz playing audibly informing its classical, and vice versa.

So you get the picture. Jazz. Meaning that back in Gauting, when I jokingly ask whether they themselves can provide the segue from Mozart to ‘Milestones’, they don’t miss a beat. ‘There is swing in every music,’ grins Colombet. ‘We talk about jazz all the time when we rehearse. In Schubert or whatever. There’s a serious swing at the beginning of Schubert’s C major Quintet!’

There has also been a serious, or at least bittersweet, driving force behind ‘Milestones’, because it represents the Ébène’s final recording project with Merlin, who after almost 25 years’ service has left to pursue his conducting and composing, notably as Artistic and Musical Director of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. At the time of this October 2023 interview, his departure hasn’t yet been officially announced. But it has happened, meaning the cellist in the dressing room is the latest of around ten cellists they’ve trialled: Yuya Okamoto, at this point only on his second or so concert with them; but as luck would have it for this article, the cellist who in February 2024 would be confirmed as Merlin’s replacement.

‘Milestones’ was therefore conceived as an ‘au revoir gift to ourselves’, as Le Magadure puts it the following lunchtime when, having parted company with Okamoto at Munich’s central railway station, the rest of us take a table at a brasserie around the corner from the university. ‘Even though we’d recorded “Fiction”, “Brazil” and the rest,’ he continues, ‘there were still pieces we’d been doing together for 20 years but hadn’t yet recorded, and Raphaël said we can’t separate without having put all of this second skin of ours on record. And we had fun making it. It’s a sad moment, but we are so at peace with him, and he with us.’

Consequently, unlike the previous jazz albums, ‘Milestones’ is just the four of them: no guests, no drums or other support – ‘a pure string quartet recording,’ emphasises Colombet. Which in turn presented some interesting challenges for the sessions. For starters, jazz bands don’t use a cello but a double bass, so the capturing had to be close enough to get the warmth and depth of bass sound, but without too much fingerboard noise – a balance that their longstanding producer and sound engineer Fabrice Planchat has certainly achieved.

Another priority was to have the genuine feel of a jazz concert. ‘If Pierre is improvising and suddenly doesn’t feel it, it’s over,’ states Le Magadure. So the guiding principle was necessarily the feeling rather than continuity of content, meaning few landmarks to work with for Planchat, who was already working without a score and just a structure outline. And boy, has that approach produced the jazz goods. Just listen to the superglued central conversation between Colombet and Merlin in Wayne Shorter’s Ana Maria, increasing in freewheeling spontaneity and virtuosity as they go; or, about three minutes into Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s All Blues, the combination of freedom and rhythmic swing in the upper strings’ slides, and Merlin’s delicate pizzicato accompaniment, which itself then blossoms into a richer-toned, multicoloured solo improvisation.

Quatuor Ébène (photography: Julien Mignot)

I ask the players to nominate their own favourite tracks. Colombet names the Charles Mingus piece Goodbye Porkpie Hat, which rounds off the album and which Merlin arranged on the train on the way to the sessions. ‘It’s an incredible, intense ballad,’ he says. ‘Our first play-through in front of the microphones gave us goosebumps, and some of that first reading will be on the recording. Mingus violently defended the cause of black people, and was a really intense guy in himself. You can feel that in his music.’

‘Chicken, by Alfred James Ellis!’ volunteers Le Magadure. ‘Raphaël arranged it for a Japan tour a year ago. It’s a musical chicken impression.’ Chilemme interjects, ‘First you play bu … bu pa … bu pa …. Then the layers build; the bass arrives —’ Suddenly, the three of them are singing, grooving at the table as they recreate the music’s chickeny pointillist opening texture. Whether Okamoto shares this instinct to sing, we will have to wait and see, but what is certain is that he’ll be singing through his instrument. ‘It has to stay vocal,’ emphasises Le Magadure as we move to unpacking their general approach to sound production. ‘With us it’s always discussions as to the way to articulate. The vocality of it, as Leopold Mozart said in his treatise. We always try to think of how we would sing it.’ Then there’s that aforementioned blending. ‘I remember once watching a documentary with the Emerson Quartet’, muses Colombet, ‘in which they talked about developing their individualities – how a concert for them is like a dialogue between four different personalities. Whereas we want the quartet to sound as one instrument.’

The other thing over which we chew the proverbial cud in that Munich brasserie is the search for a new cellist – and very specifically a new cellist, rather than a new Merlin. ‘That is not the answer,’ explains Le Magadure. ‘I can feel myself sometimes thinking, “I would love to hear Raphaël in this situation.” But that’s not good. You have to forget that – but not forget the memories – because the search is definitely not about what Raphaël was doing.’

They quiz me on my own impressions. Back in the dressing room, I’d asked them whether they could put their sound into words, and they’d turned the question back on me. My answer: if the Ébène were a kitchen utensil it would be a Japanese knife – sleekly sharp-edged and polished; powerful enough to slice through anything (cue Colombet making a swishing sound effect), but with the precision and agility to carve the most filigree sushi; all wielded with a very French combination of joie de vivre and intensity. ‘I accept!’ Colombet had laughed. ‘That makes me happy. My wife, who is Japanese, says similar. She says we are sharp and shiny’.

So, how to preserve that instantly recognisable sound without limiting and frustrating themselves by looking for an identikit Merlin. A few months previously, I’d heard them with another cellist whose tone had been gorgeous, but also so rich, dark and wide that, to continue the analogising, the Ébène blade had sounded as though wrapped in a black velvet curtain – audible, but dulled. By contrast, with Okamoto they were already sounding like the Ébène, both in the rapturously received evening concert and during the rehearsal.

That rehearsal had itself been fascinating. Since its earliest years, the Ébène has warmed up by slow-playing – originally, a daily Bach chorale, working on being really in tune, with a good homogeneous sound. These days it’s not necessarily Bach, and they might be using it more to adapt to or tame a tricky concert hall acoustic. The dry-as-a-bone Bosco Kulturhaus certainly was that, to which were added a brand-new cellist to assimilate and a brand-new programme. They warmed up with the Haydn slow movement, taken slowly, chord by chord, no vibrato, the four of them eyes upwards in concentration, intent on the intonation and locking into each other. Occasionally, one person would walk to the back of the theatre to listen as the others continued playing. With the Bartók, the analysis had deepened. Metronome on, they structurally and rhythmically dissected a section, practising its game of motivic catch by each playing just the first note of their entry, then the first two, moving the accents around, gradually building it up, Colombet exclaiming with pleasure: ‘It’s so well written!’ That night, the Bartók was a show-stopper: gleaming, vocal-like rhetorical freedom combining to dazzling effect with rhythmic precision and swing, Chilemme’s and Okamoto’s tones really blending. Perhaps overall there wasn’t quite the usual cello sensuousness and boldness, but it felt as if those qualities were there in Okamoto, waiting to reveal themselves.

Back now in the Munich brasserie, Le Magadure comments, ‘More and more, I love playing with Okamoto. We are ourselves with him. He has intimacy, and this intimacy is moving.’

Looking to the future, the coming season is as exciting and innovative as ever, including the spring 2025 premiere of Merlin’s new string quartet (co-commissioned by – among others – Radio France, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie and Wigmore Hall), a Mendelssohn and Enescu octets tour to the Americas and Asia with the Ébène’s close colleagues the Belcea Quartet, and a June touring project with Scottish fiddler Chris Stout and Celtic harpist Catriona McKay. Yet when the players are asked about their future goals, it’s qualities, not career gongs, that they instinctively name: continuing to improve, retaining the passion, not falling into a routine. As Le Magadure points out, ‘It would be easy to say, “OK, we’re now 45, we should take things easier, reduce rehearsals.” But that’s not us, and I think we can be proud of not forgetting why we’re here.’

Transmission is another priority, and if you look at the past decade’s explosion of young quartet talent, many are French, and many are at least influenced, some also coached, by the Ébène, among them the Agate, Akilone, Arod, Elmire and Hanson quartets. The world is increasingly full of young quartets who warm up very slowly.

Post-Munich, we next cross paths by chance, outside a restaurant in late July 2024 at the Verbier Festival. I ask if they want to give me a quick top-up quote, now that Okamoto is official. No need, they tell me. They’re making music, they’re peaceful, they’re happy. And yes. Standing there in the alpine sunshine, they look it: Colombet, Le Magadure, Chilemme and Okamoto. A new era has begun.

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Gramophone today