Catching up with Quatuor Ébène violinists Pierre Colombet and Gabriel Le Magadure for this interview, there’s a certain sense of déjà vu. We’re meeting as the quartet touches down in London for the third Wigmore Hall concert in its complete Beethoven quartets cycle – the same project which in 2019 saw them perform and live-record all 16 quartets between Philadelphia, Vienna, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Melbourne, Nairobi and Paris, ahead of 2020’s Beethoven 250th anniversary celebrations.
That particularly acclaimed series was supposed to be followed in 2020 by a second worldwide tour, taking in many more countries and cities. We all know what happened next. Six years, a pandemic and a change of cellist later, not only is that marathon tour finally rebuilt and underway as the Ébène’s main project for this season and next, but for the quartet’s two longest-standing members, it’s feeling like a whole new undertaking.
“It’s already a magical experience, and also a new one,” says Le Magadure. “Yuya [Okamoto, who replaced longstanding cellist Raphaël Merlin in 2024] has never played a complete Beethoven cycle before, and Marie [Chilemme, on viola] was just joining us when we were recording in 2019. So being able to play this cycle again with the new team, we have a lot to work on. We’re not taking a rest after this leg of the tour, because we have only two weeks to practice all the quartets at the same time before going to Japan, including five quartets we haven’t yet looked at. It’s a little bit crazy and complicated, and not something we ever experienced before – but it’s worth it.”
Inevitably, different pressures require different practicing tactics. For instance, the Ébène has famously used slow-motion work to perfect ensemble intonation and balance, ever since Colombet first founded the quartet in 1999 with fellow students at the Boulogne-Billancourt conservatoire, just outside Paris. Today, while that remains in their toolbox as they jump between quartets, there’s more in-tempo work. They’re also now allocating mornings to individual technical practice, before coming together in the afternoons. “For me it’s a different way of working,” Colombet says, “but at the moment it’s a positive one, in which we can be more structured and efficient.”
Fuelling the above is the extent to which, as the cycle progresses, audiences are growing in number and enthusiasm. Nowhere is this more exciting than in Italy, where they’ve always enjoyed touring for its food and sun, but found its audiences less into chamber music than opera and orchestras. “Now it’s like an adoption,” marvels Le Magadure. “We played for a virtually full house in Milan three days ago.” They now want to play in Italy regularly.
Beyond Beethoven, one other significant event on Colombet’s personal calendar is in September: he will sit on the string quartet jury of the 75th ARD International Music Competition in Munich. It is the very competition which in 2004 catapulted the Ébène to international fame (then Colombet and Le Magadure with Raphaël Merlin on cello and Mathieu Herzog on viola). “If classical music were sport, then the ARD would be the Olympic Games of string quartet,” Colombet says. “Before the ARD we had no career. We were doing perhaps 10 concerts a year (‘In France!’ interjects Le Magadure with a laugh). Then overnight it went to 135. There was no transition.”
“We had worked like hell for it,” Colombet says. “Looking back at the pictures, Gabriel and I look like zombies, we were eating so little.” The quartet would collect six prizes, including the Audience Prize. “I will always remember being on the stage, with the prizes being announced, and it was always us. Then when finally they came to announce the First Prize, we thought, ‘Okay, for sure we don’t have First because we already have too many’ – and then we did! We were almost a little bit embarrassed, because our competitors were very good quartets!”
They could sense upon arrival that the ARD Competition was unusually important. “There was something in the Munich air that was different,” reminisces Le Magadure. “The atmosphere was on fire. The musical world was congregating there. Management, everything” – and indeed the other outcome of the competition was gaining Sonia Simmenauer as their manager, with whose artist agency they remain to this day.
Asked about career highlights since, they name their 2009 Carnegie Hall debut, during which Le Magadure was so nervous that his bow flew out of his fingers only for him to catch it mid-air and carry on. “For a whole movement I was shaking as I played,” he laughs. “My God, it was something.”
Another is a backstage visit in Vienna from former Alban Berg Quartett first violinist Günter Pichler (1940–2026). “It was really, really emotional, especially for Pierre,” remembers Le Magadure. “We felt the sense of legacy.”
Further memorable meetings have happened onstage, courtesy of the quartet’s collaborative spirit. Pianists Evgeny Kissin and Sir András Schiff are quickly named; and classical/jazz composer, clarinettist and saxophonist Michel Portal is lovingly singled out, given the importance of cross-genre projects for the quartet. “Michel has been so important to our ability to be free in every music,” says Le Magadure. “It was already in our DNA, but he was the key to not doubting ourselves”.
With the Ébène also teaching and mentoring young quartets, talk soon moves to how the young quartet landscape has changed over the decades. For starters, while there were perhaps four or five other quartets in France when they were starting out, “now there are maybe 50” observes Colombet, “and around the world, thousands.”
The positive aspect of this is the explosion it implies in younger-generation enthusiasm for the quartet repertoire and career – driven in part by the inspiration of the Ébène and other quartets such as the Belcea and Modigliani. Yet all these young quartets are also discovering that it’s far from an easy ride. Beyond the sheer amount of competition, many are forming only towards the end of studies, which themselves are taking longer as higher qualifications become the norm.
If quartets are forming in their members’ mid to late 20s, when musicians also want to be professionally active and earning, it’s much more difficult to find the 6 to 9 hours of daily practice necessary to establish good footing as an ensemble. It was through this that the young Ébène members honed – while still in their late teens and early 20s – the striking ensemble intonation, balance and virtuosity, and sleekly polished, Japanese-knife-esque sound that so set them apart.
More sobering still is that as young musicians form ever more new string quartets, taste-makers – broadcasters, promoters, record labels, educators – are disembarking. To take the Ébène’s home country, cites Colombet, France’s single high-quality, prime-time musical television show, the annual Les Victoires de la Musique award ceremony, hasn’t had a chamber music category since 2009.
“Every year I force myself to watch it, and every year I’m angrier and angrier,” he says. “Even when we won Ensemble of the Year in 2010 and were invited to play, they wanted us to play the theme to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. We did our own arrangement, but we weren’t allowed to play deep, intense, beautiful classical music; and it’s true that it would have bored viewers, because they are not being educated to be otherwise.” He continues, “It is the responsibility of organisations to respect and believe in the power of good music, and therefore to sell it. That’s not what’s happening.”
One of the reasons for this attitude, Colombet believes, is that organisations with the platforms to promote culture have forgotten what it’s there for in the first place. “Culture is not supposed to make its producers masses of money,” he points out. “For a few it will. But culture’s purpose is supposed to be as the cement of society, giving people the strength to do their day job well, and nurturing us as human beings who were not made to live as individuals. As such, there should be no question about it. But right now, the opposite is happening. We are more and more individualised. Screens is one reason – look around you on the subway, and 99 percent of the people are looking at their individual screen. To balance this, we need concerts and culture even more than ever before.”
Further rebalancing in the professional sphere, they continue, needs to happen, with major chamber ensembles paid a fraction of what top soloists or conductors can earn – which itself then has to be split multiple ways. “We understand that a soloist can be paid four times more than us,” Colombet says. “It’s difficult to travel and be judged alone.” “But not 20 times more,” adds Le Magadure. “It’s crazy that it’s financially difficult even for the greatest string quartets.”
Asked about the future for the Ébène, Le Magadure hopes “to continue being enriched by the human side of this incredible adventure, and to keep discovering all there is to discover! I mean, we can’t ever get bored, the literature is so bottomless.” One soon-to-be-unveiled adventure is another cross-genre album, recently recorded, for which they’ve combined string quartet with electronic music. “And this is what we love,” enthuses Colombet. “To switch from Beethoven to electronic music is for us actually not a big gap. It’s just enriching.”
Enriching and encouraging is ultimately how they also view the future of chamber music. After all, with many more young quartets in the world, even amid all the challenges, it does ultimately amount to many more quartet concerts than previously. And come September in Munich, for Colombet there’s the prospect of giving one quartet a similar boost to that which the Ébène received 22 years ago. “I’m so happy to be part of this year’s ARD Competition,” he concludes. “I would have cancelled concerts to do it if necessary. We believe deeply in it. Our own memories of competing there are some of the best of our lives, and I’m sure that the winners of this season will be helped.”
The 75th ARD International Music Competition runs from 30th August to 18th September 2026 in Munich.
See upcoming performances by Quatuor Ébène.
This article was sponsored by ARD International Music Competition.
