Iris Günther, violin
Leonie Flaksman, violin
Francesca Rivinius, viola
Karolin Spegg, cello
The Elaia Quartet is a young string quartet, founded in September 2020 and based in Berlin.
Currently, the four musicians are studying in the Master’s program in Chamber Music at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin with Prof. Wolfgang Redik. The quartet has also received artistic influences from the Quatuor Ébène and personalities such as Eberhard Feltz, Eckart Runge, Oliver Wille, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Heime Müller, Muriel Cantoreggi, and Sebastian Hamann.
The quartet made its debut in Italy, where it performed at the Ascoli Piceno Festival in the fall of 2021. Since then, the quartet has been awarded several prizes, including the Audience Award at the digital music education competition Kammer?Musik! of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie 2021 and the 2nd prize at the online competition Zukunftsklang Award 2022 in the category ‘String Quartet’. At the Deutscher Musikwettbewerb 2022, the Elaia Quartet also won a scholarship and can therefore look forward to numerous concerts in the 2023/24 season. Other highlights in 2022 included a joint concert with Karl Leister, former solo clarinetist of the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as participation in the PODIUM Festival Esslingen, where the four musicians were involved in several collaborative concerts and creative educational formats. In the fall of 2022, they also performed again at the Ascoli Piceno Festival, where they were artists in residence and were able to play their own concerts as well as collaborate with other artists such as Christophe Coin and Daniel Rowland and young composers. They presented the works of the three finalists in the Vladimir Mendelssohn Competition composition competition.
The Elaia Quartet is currently working on acquiring a broad repertoire and developing interesting concert programs and formats, including in collaboration with artists from other art and music disciplines.
Since spring 2023, they play with the great chamber musician and violinist Iris Günther, as Theresa Jensen had to leave the quartet for a full-time job in the radio orchestra of Saarbrücken.