Quatuor Danel

Quatuor Danel is a French-Belgian string quartet that was founded by two brothers and a sister. They can be heard on the soundtrack of Suite 16, a film by Dominique Deruddere.

The quartet was founded in 1991 in Brussels, by France-born Marc Danel (violin), Guy Danel (cello) and their sister Juliette Danel (viola). At the age of twenty, Guy played second cello with the Symphony Orchestra of the Muntschouwburg in Brussels, when his younger brother and sister invited him to attend masterclasses together with the Amadeus Quartet, in Cologne. During six masterclasses they first played as a trio, gradually supplemented with a different second violin each time. After that, they attended masterclasses with the Borodin Quartet, in England, to deepen their knowledge of the music of Shostakovich. They enjoyed playing together so much that they enlisted Gilles Millet as permanent second violin for the project and officially became Quatuor Danel.

The quartet performs both classical repertoire and contemporary music. Their recordings of music for string quartets by Russian composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Mieczysław Weinberg are the reference works. Certainly the interpretation of Weinberg is their specialization. When they started with it in the 1990s, few people had confidence in that choice. Marc Danel stated in 2019 in an interview with the website Klassiek Centraal: "We had to fight hard for it. People didn't see the point of it. There were hardly any recordings.