Kuss Quartet

Supported by the Government of Lower Saxony and Musik 21, it commissioned four new works for string quartet from composers Enno Pope, Aribert Reimann, Manfred Trojahn, Bruno Mantovani, Iris ter Schiporst, Johannes Fischer and Mark Andre. This led to collaborations with the Concertgebouw and the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, the Paris Biennial, the Wigmore Hall in London and the Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
It regularly collaborates with Miklós Perényi, Dénes Várjon, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Sarah Maria-Sun, Maurice Steger, Johannes Fischer and many others.
In 2019 the Kuss Quartet was the first German quartet to be entrusted with Stradivari’s legendary ‘Paganini Quartet’ by the Nippon Music Foundation. With these instruments, in June 2019 the Quartet performed the complete cycle of Beethoven’s Quartets at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo.
A further innovative project was ‘KUSS@KOKON’: with the collaboration of the dancers Yui Kawaguchi and Ruben Reniers, the percussionist Johannes Fischer and the slam poet Bas Böttcher, the Kuss Quartet developed modular concerts, with the support of a grant for the “restart” from the German Federal Foundation for Culture.
Force and Freedom, a multi-genre program dedicated to Beethoven, was created together with director Nicola Hümpel and her Music and Dance Theater ‘Nico and The Navigators’.
It has won first prizes such as the one awarded by the Deutscher Musikrat and the Borciani Competition, the Borletti-Buitoni Prize and was named ‘Rising Star’ of the European Concert Hall Organization.

Jana Kuss violin
Oliver Wille violin
William Coleman viola
Mikayel Hakhnazaryan cello