The quartet has won fourteen international prizes at string quartet competitions across Europe, including London, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Rome, Cluj, Graz, Florence and Hamburg. Other awards include the Romanian Music Critics Award for ‘Best Chamber Music Ensemble’ of the year, 1995, and ‘Order of Knights in Performing Arts’, conferred by the Romanian President, Klaus Iohannis, in 2022 for their contribution towards Romanian heritage and for successfully representing Romania in Ireland for two decades.

In 2016, the members of the quartet were awarded Honorary Doctorates in Music from the NUI Galway in recognition of their cultural work in Ireland and for their service to Galway in the areas of music performance and education.

ConTempo Quartet has commissioned and premiered over one hundred Irish contemporary and historical works. Irish new music was showcased in their international concerts, including concerts at Carnegie Hall, New York, and Wigmore Hall, London, in a three-year EU project, New Music: New Audiences, as well as in ‘Composing the Island’, the largest ever festival of Irish music, surveying the century 1916-2016, presented by RTÉ in collaboration with National Concert Hall, Dublin.

ConTempo Quartet performed over two thousand nine hundred concerts worldwide in venues such as Philarmonie Berlin, Wigmore Hall in London, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Tel-Aviv Performing Arts Centre in Israel, Tokyo University of the Arts in Japan, Carnegie Hall in New York, National Concert Hall in Dublin, Beverly Hilton Hall in Los Angeles and Théatre du Châtelet in Paris.

The quartet has had the honour of performing in front of heads of state, Nobel Prize Laureates, and Hollywood stars.

The quartet’s discography can be found on the Sony, Universal, Quartz, NMC, VEB Deutsche Schalplatten, RTÉ lyric fm and HBO labels. The quartet arranged and recorded the soundtrack for several European and American films including Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s Band of Brothers. ConTempo’s collaborations with artists from different fields of art and music came to fruition with the release of two crossover CD albums. New Airs, which took the No. 3 spot in iTunes charts, is a multi-disciplinary album that unites the classical music world with Irish rock, traditional and pop music from the last thirty years to the present, reimagined for string quartet, bodhrán and electronics. Spiccato Junction album is a collaboration between ConTempo and Irish trad musicians Máirtín O’Connor, Garry O’Briain and Cathal Hayden.
Crossover collaborations with local artists and Irish composers have been at the core of ConTempo’s work since 2003.
In 2019 and 2020, the quartet celebrated their 25th anniversary season through a series of live and online events, including a Beethoven250 series as part of the Galway International Arts Festival, continued their popular, long-standing Galway monthly chamber music series, From Europe with Love, part of their Galway Music Residency programme, a tour of Belgium and the official launch of their CD album of Swan Hennessey’s string quartet works, newly rediscovered by the German musicologist Axel Klein.
For 2025/2026, the four members of ConTempo planned a series of festivals, cross-over collaborations, gala concerts and recordings to celebrate their thirtieth anniversary and twenty years since their arrival in Ireland. 

This concert is presented by the OPW as part of the 2026 Cultural Programme at Rathfarnham Castle. Doors open at 7.30pm and the performance runs from 8pm to 9.30pm. 

Áirithint