Quatuor Van Kuijk with Sean Shibe guitar

Quatuor Van Kuijk’s international accolades include First, Best Beethoven, and Best Haydn Prizes at the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet competition, as well as becoming laureates of the Aix-en-Provence Festival Academy. They were BBC New Generation Artists 2015-17, as well as ECHO Rising Stars for the 2017-18 season. Following such high success early in their career, the ensemble is an established international presence and has been invited to perform at many leading concert halls and festivals. 2022 marked Quatuor Van Kuijk’s 10-year anniversary, with a number of special projects centring around Mendelssohn’s string quartet cycle.

Quatuor Van Kuijk was resident at ProQuartet, Paris, where they studied with members of the Alban Berg, Artemis, and Hagen quartets. The Quartet is supported by Pirastro and SPEDIDAM and is grateful to Mécénat Musical Société Générale for their sponsorship.

The innovative approach to his instrument of Sean Shibe, one of the most versatile guitarists performing today, has enhanced his reputation for having ‘one of the most discriminating ears in the business’ (Gramophone). He was the first guitarist ever to be selected for BBC Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme and to receive the Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Young Artists. Accolades for his recordings include two Gramophone Awards and an Opus Klassik.

A great admirer of the masterful composers of the past, Shibe is equally committed to new music. Alongside his own transcriptions of Bach’s lute suites and seventeenth century Scottish lute manuscripts, he continues to explore, experiment, and expand the repertoire for his instrument with recent works by Daniel Kidane, David Fennessy, Shiva Feshareki, David Lang, Julia Wolfe and Freya Waley-Cohen. New commissions include works by Thomas Ades, Helen Grime and a new collaboration with Cassandra Miller and Dunedin Consort.