Artie’s Festival India returns with the complete Beethoven quartets at the NCPA

Gauthier Herrmann first came to India in 2001, carrying a cello and the usual assumptions European musicians tend to have about where Western classical music belongs. He was young then, travelling as a soloist, performing chamber music in cities where audiences for string quartets were small and scattered. He kept returning anyway. Mumbai became a recurring stop. Then it became something more permanent.

Herrmann founded Artie’s Festival India at the National Centre for the Performing Arts

In 2008, Herrmann founded Artie’s Festival India at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, alongside NCPA chairman Khushroo N. Suntook. The festival grew gradually, bringing international chamber musicians to India while sending performances into schools, orphanages and neighbourhoods far removed from the formality of concert halls. Over time, Artie’s travelled beyond India too, appearing in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Gulf. But Mumbai remained its emotional centre.

This month, the festival arrives at its 30th edition with Mostly Beethoven, an ambitious, two-year traversal of Ludwig van Beethoven’s complete string quartets ahead of the composer’s 200th death anniversary in 2027. The concerts, spread across four instalments between 2026 and 2027, will not unfold chronologically. Herrmann prefers collision over order. Early quartets will sit beside the late ones. Beethoven’s sharp wit may give way to spiritual exhaustion within the same evening.

Herrmann speaks about Indian audiences with a kind of astonishment that has sharpened rather than faded over the years. “European audiences have grown accustomed to listening to increasingly shorter works,” he says. “I do not observe this tendency in India at all. Listeners have preserved this remarkable ability to fully engage with and marvel at long, profound works.”

That capacity for attention matters with Beethoven, particularly the late quartets, where the music often feels less composed than wrestled into existence. The quartets demand patience from performers too. Herrmann, who spends much of his time outside music running ultra-marathons across punishing distances, hears a deep connection between endurance sport and Beethoven’s emotional architecture.

“People often say that in music, the preparation time spent studying, practicing, questioning and refining the works is just as important as the performance itself in front of an audience,” he says. “In many ways, endurance racing is exactly the same.”

This May’s performances feature violinists Nathan Mierdl and Emma Gibout, violist Violaine Despeyroux and Herrmann on cello, with the young clarinettist Joë Christophe joining for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Mozart enters the programme almost like relief. His music opens windows where Beethoven tends to build walls.

At the NCPA, where more than 700 performances are staged each year, Mostly Beethoven arrives during a cultural moment dominated by compression. Everything now appears designed to shorten attention spans, trim duration, move faster. A complete Beethoven quartet cycle argues for the opposite. It asks audiences to remain seated inside uncertainty, dissonance and repetition until something finally gives way.

Day 1 - Mostly Beethoven

Experimental Theatre, NCPA | May 20, 2026 | 7:00 PM

Day 2 - Mostly Beethoven

Experimental Theatre, NCPA | May 24, 2026 | 7:00 PM

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