JACK Quartet + Ellen Fullman
As the “Portrait Musicians” at the Festival d'Automne à Paris JACK Quartet’s first performance at the Festival pairs them with legend of instrument building, Ellen Fullman, offering a deeply personal performance on a sculptural scale. Fullman’s work is a monumental achievement, requiring days of installation and hyper-attenuation of each string's intonation, creating a uniquely vibrating sonic image in space as the quartet plays among the Long String Instrument's overtones.

Program:
Ellen Fullman, Energy Archive 2 (World Premiere)

Ellen Fullman, Energy Archive 2, for long string instrument and the JACK Quartet (2025), commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris. 

Pinault Collection and the Festival d’Automne à Paris present this concert as a co-production.

La Fondation d'entreprise Société Générale is the main sponsor of the Portrait JACK Quartet.

European Premiere of Beautiful Trouble
Rocketing ecstatically between sadness and joyfulness, Natacha Diels’s Beautiful Trouble is an evening-length ‘opera’ (as dramatic spectacle) for JACK Quartet that explores a slim window of human existence. Moments gathered like precious stones coalesce to create both sense and nonsense, forming a logic all the piece’s own. Organizing the stones just so reveals clarity in chaos, if only for a moment. “Beautiful Trouble is a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft, and a testament, however offbeat, to the JACK Quartet’s unshakeable courage and coherence.” — Steve Smith, Musical America

Program: All by Natacha Diels
Episode 1, On Monday
Episode 2, Nightmare for JACK (a ballet)
Episode 3, Sometimes it's the Last Time
Episode 4, An Incredible Easy Method That Works For All (Auto-Pilot)
Episode 5, Beautiful Trouble

Composition, Direction and Video | Natacha Diels
Costumes | Maile Okamura
Technical and Sound Director | Matthew Craig
Lights | Kent Sprague

JACK Quartet + John Luther Adams
JACK Quartet brings a program of music by frequent collaborator, John Luther Adams, to Musica Strasbourg Festival.

Program: All by John Luther Adams
Wind in High Places (2010)
Lines Made by Walking (2019) European Premiere

Beautiful Trouble at Théâtre Silvia Monfort
Rocketing ecstatically between sadness and joyfulness, Natacha Diels’s Beautiful Trouble is an evening-length ‘opera’ (as dramatic spectacle) for JACK Quartet that explores a slim window of human existence. Moments gathered like precious stones coalesce to create both sense and nonsense, forming a logic all the piece’s own. Organizing the stones just so reveals clarity in chaos, if only for a moment. “Beautiful Trouble is a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft, and a testament, however offbeat, to the JACK Quartet’s unshakeable courage and coherence.” — Steve Smith, Musical America

Program:
Natacha Diels, Beautiful Trouble (2024)
Episode 1, On Monday
Episode 2, Nightmare for JACK (a ballet)
Episode 3, Sometimes it's the Last Time
Episode 4, An Incredible Easy Method That Works For All (Auto-Pilot)
Episode 5, Beautiful Trouble

Composition, Direction and Video | Natacha Diels
Costumes | Maile Okamura
Technical and Sound Director | Matthew Craig
Lights | Kent Sprague

A co-presentation by Théâtre Silvia Monfort and Festival d'Automne à Paris.

La Fondation d'entreprise Société Générale is the main sponsor of the Portrait JACK Quartet.

Haas in the Dark
For JACK Quartet’s final performance as the “Portrait Musicians” at the Festival d'Automne à Paris, the quartet performs Georg Friedrich Haas’ In iij Noct in absolute darkness. The playing space becomes distended, each of the members of the quartet being as far away as possible from each other, and surrounding the audience. The duration of the work is also rendered mobile, in constant evolution. The audience finds itself left to the discretion of the musicians, deprived of sight and who communicate only through what they play, plunged in the immersive power of darkness.

Program:
Georg Friedrich Haas, In iij Noct. (2001)

Presented in collaboration by Théâtre de la Ville-Paris and the Festival d’Automne à Paris.

La Fondation d'entreprise Société Générale is the main sponsor of the Portrait JACK Quartet.