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29 TALICH QUARTET For fifty years now, the Talich Quartet has taken its place in a prestigious lineage of Czech musicians. The very name ‘Talich’ evokes the banks of the Vltava, so dear to Smetana and to the people of Prague. JanTalich Senior, the creator of the Quartet, was the nephew of Václav Talich, music director of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1919 to 1939. It was he who made it one of the world’s finest orchestras before Karel Ančerl came to harvest the fruits he had so patiently cultivated. In 1997, the lastmusician in the family, JanTalich Jr, took over the reins of the quartet from his father, surrounding himself with three talented musicians. The future is now theirs to mould, a future they cannot envisage without taking account of their tradition. In their first forty years, the Talich revealed a style, an approach, a philosophy of music that the current line-up perpetuates and continues to nurture. The new members have succeeded in preserving that lightness of tone combined with density of argument, that spontaneity of expression combined with musical experience, those unexpected accents combinedwith those rooted in an illustrious tradition, that innate feeling for allusions to folk music blended with a culture passed on from generation to generation, which characterised their elders. www.talichquartet.com TALICH QUARTET