Opus13 (strings)

Opus13 play Cowdray Hall on Thursday 3 December, from 12.45pm to 1.45pm. It's a lunchtime concert, so you can slip in and out over an hour, and the programme pairs something contemporary with a late-Romantic staple: Thomas Adès's Arcadiana (20 minutes) and Edvard Grieg's String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 27 (35 minutes).

Opus13 is a Norwegian string quartet formed in Oslo in 2014 by four teenagers. They took their name from Mendelssohn's String Quartet No. 6 in A Minor, Op. 13—the first piece they ever played together. These days the quartet consists of violinists Sonoko Miriam Welde and Edvard Erdal, violist Albin Uusijärvi and cellist Daniel Thorell, two of them from Sweden. They play on an exceptional set of instruments: a 1736 Antonio Stradivari violin on loan, a 1751 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini violin, a 2008 Christophe Landon viola and a 1772 Giuseppe & Antonio Gagliano cello.

It's been a big couple of years for them. They took first prize at both the 2025 Wigmore Hall and the Bordeaux International String Quartet Competitions, were named BBC New Generation Artists in September 2026 and received the Borletti-Buitoni Award in the spring of that year. Beyond the stage, they're the founders and artistic directors of Vinterspill på Lillehammer, a chamber music festival in Norway.

The concert runs from 12.45pm to 1.45pm at Cowdray Hall in Aberdeen, and it's pay what you can.