Four French Women, a volcano, an encounter to remember

Concerts | January 24, 2025

“Four French Women, a Volcano, an encounter to remember.
The Quatuor Akilone gave Catania a concert that went beyond interpreting music: it transformed it into a living dialogue between place and audience.

Haydn, Dvořák, a touch of Sicilian tradition, and an unending curiosity for the world around them: the Akilone don’t just play with impeccable technique; they bring an interpretative intelligence that turns them into storytellers. Nothing about their approach feels incidental. You sense it in how the Cypresses become more than a song transcribed for a quartet, or in the delicate way their bow tremolo transforms into a Sicilian mandolin in Mi votu e mi rivotu. It’s music that listens to the land, rather than the other way around: it traverses it, inhabits it, absorbs its essence, its voices, its silences, and its memories, only to give it back in the form of sound

And then there’s Etna. There’s history.
There’s Haydn’s Earthquake, echoing the disaster that reduced Catania to rubble in 1693, and the quartet lies directly beneath our feet, not at the center of the scene. The stone steps tremble under our seats, like an invisible quake shaking the earth: beneath us, where everything begins, ends, and is reborn.Their performance breathed the landscape itself, that tension between lush, thriving nature and the volcano looming above, always ready to remind us who the master of the house truly is. This synthesis of power and hospitality is what the Akilone captured so beautifully. With balance, depth, and above all, with a rare ability to translate into music what so often eludes words.”

Monica Saso

The Quatuor Akilone gave Catania a concert that went beyond interpreting music

Fascinating, this explosion of the quartet: it was like watching a solar system, with the composition at its core as the sun, and the quartet orbiting around it like planets, only to return to the center and recompose the entire system.”

Nello Nicotra

SThe Quatuor Akilone Concert in Catania