Festival d’Automne : JACK Quartet Portrait
After supporting the Festival d’Automne for ten editions from 2007 to 2016, the Société Générale Corporate Foundation became a patron of the Festival once again in 2025 to support the JACK Quartet Portrait. This renewed partnership reflects the Foundation’s commitment to innovative artistic projects.
Founded in 2005 in New York, the JACK Quartet — composed of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell — is a pioneering ensemble in contemporary chamber music. In residence at the Mannes School of Music, the quartet has distinguished itself through significant commissioning and recording work, recognised with two GRAMMY® Award nominations and the 2024 Michael Jaffee Visionary Award from Chamber Music America.
As part of its 2025 edition, the Festival d’Automne presents a Portrait dedicated to the JACK Quartet, consisting of three concerts — three radically different experiences that redefine the possibilities of a string quartet:
• Concert 1: Extending the String into Space
A meeting between the JACK Quartet and Ellen Fullman, whose long‑string instruments transform the environment into a vast vibrating space. This dialogue resonates beneath the dome of the Bourse de Commerce, in the Rotunda.
• Concert 2: The Physicality of Musical Gesture
With Beautiful Trouble, a collaboration with composer Natacha Diels, the quartet becomes a moving body, blending music, performance, theatre, video, and stage gesture. A concert to be seen as much as heard.
• Concert 3: Sonic Immersion in Darkness
The JACK Quartet immerses listeners in total darkness with Georg Friedrich Haas’s Third Quartet, In iij. Noct. Listening without seeing — experiencing music differently — in absolute immersion.
Founded in 1972, the Festival d’Automne is a multidisciplinary contemporary‑art festival that brings together theatre, music, visual arts, film, and dance. It is recognised for its boldness and international outlook, welcoming more than 1,000 artists each year through collaborations with major international festivals. This unique space embodies a vision in which creation knows no boundaries and each project expands artistic horizons.
In the musical field, the 2025 edition marks the arrival of Clara Iannotta as the new Artistic Director for Music.