A notable partnership

In June, Amber Quartet will give a concert at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, with a program of string quartet works by Mendelssohn, where they will also talk about and provide background knowledge of G. Henle Publishers and urtext.

In 2022, the company is presenting its "string quartet year", which will feature world-famous quartets at different venues around the world.

Amber Quartet is one of the most successful Chinese quartets and has won much critical acclaim. In early 2013, it became the first chamber music group to receive funding from the Chinese government for overseas studies-the group was accepted to study for two years at the International Institute of Chamber Music of Madrid in Spain.

In the same year, the quartet won three awards at the Asia-Pacific Chamber Music Competition in Melbourne: the Grand Prize, the Dame Elisabeth Murdoch Prize, and the Hamer-Tribe Trust Prize. It was the first Chinese quartet to win a "hat-trick" of prizes at an international chamber music competition.

Seiffert, who has frequently traveled to China since the late 1990s, says he is impressed by the country's fast development of the classical music scene. He also notes that a greater number of Chinese musicians are getting jobs in top European orchestras.

"Every time I visited China, I slept just a few hours, hoping to explore the country as much as possible," he says. "I was amazed by the progress of the musicians' playing and their proficiency with the instruments they used."

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Seiffert, 62, gained his PhD in musicology from the University of Munich in 1990. In the same year, he became an editor at G. Henle Verlag and in 2000, he became the president of the company. He is keen on bringing high-quality urtext editions to Asia, especially to China and South Korea, as well as developing digital urtext editions and opening the catalog to contemporary compositions.

The cooperation between musicologists and musicians is very important to enriching research of composers' musical texts, he says, though in earlier times, the two parties used to be much more supercilious toward each other.

"These days, the situation is more of a friendly respect," says Seiffert. "We have to acknowledge that both sides have something to learn from working together.

"Hopefully, when the pandemic is over, I can watch an Amber Quartet concert in China," he adds.