Acies Quartett

The Acies Quartett has performed around the world, sometimes as official musical ambassadors of their native Austria. The group benefited from training with a large group of the world's top chamber players. The Acies Quartett was formed in 2000 by a group of four students at the Kärntner Landeskonservatoriu (Carinthian State Conservatory) in western Austria. The quartet's members are violinists Benjamin Ziervogel and Raphael Kasprian, violist Josef Bizak, and cellist Thomas Wiesflecker. Early in their career, the group took lessons from violinist Brian Finlayson, becoming his first chamber music students. In 2005, the quartet traveled to New York for work with the Juilliard Quartet, and after that, enrolled in a variety of master classes with some of the world's top quartets -- the Alban Berg Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet, the Amadeus Quartet, and others -- at summer institutes in Prague, Paris, Siena, and Hamburg. These lessons paid off with important prizes, including a first prize in the string quartet category at Austria's Prima la musica and Gradus ad Parnassum competitions in 2003 and 2006, respectively. In 2007, the quartet was named Artist of the Year by Ö1, Austria's national broadcaster. The group made major debuts over the next several years, including at the Konzerthaus Vienna in 2008 (as part of the "Jeunesse Austria Tour") and the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg in 2010. That year, the Acies Quartett was selected by Austria's Foreign Ministry as ambassadors for its New Austrian Sound of Music program and toured Europe, south and southeast Asia (including Vietnam), and the U.S. under its auspices. The group has maintained a busy concert schedule since then, appearing not only at chamber music venues across central and western Europe but with the Bruckner Orchestra in Linz and with members of the Vienna Philharmonic in Schubert's Octet in F major, D. 803. The Acies Quartett has a substantial recording catalog on the Gramola label, beginning in 2007 with a recording of quartets by Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. In 2020, the group issued an album of quartets by pianists Glenn Gould and Friedrich Gulda on Gramola.
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