For those not in the know, Quatuor Mémoire is a Montréal-based string quartet dedicated to contemporary music. Formed in 2024, the ensemble includes Bailey Wantuch and Meggie Lacombe (violins), Marilou Lepage (viola), and Audréanne Filion (cello), graduates of the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and the Schulich School of Music at McGill University.

Their name reflects their mission: to contribute to the formation of collective memory through the creation and dissemination of today’s repertoire.

In addition to new music, Mémoire has explored Canadian works from the 20th century, including quartets by Jean Coulthard, Serge Garant, and John Weinzweig. Notably, they gave the first full performance of Serge Garant’s Trois pièces pour quatuor à cordes (1958).

Highlights of the 2025-2026 season include a co-production with No Hay Banda to present two new works for quartet and soprano by Lily Koslow and Hannah A. Barnes, and the premiere of Olivier St-Pierre’s concerto for string quartet alongside Ensemble Éclat as part of the SMCQ’s 60th-anniversary season.

Indeed, this debut release Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn (available December 12th, 2025) from the Montréal-based quartet emerges from one of those rare moments of serendipitous convergence. The idea for the album was born—almost by chance—in the summer of 2023 at Darmstadt. There, the composer of this recording’s titular piece, Olivier St-Pierre, was speaking with cellist Audréanne Filion, who was telling him enthusiastically about a brand-new ensemble she was forming dedicated to promoting contemporary repertoire for string quartet.

Filion was already familiar with Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn, having worked on the piece with St-Pierre while they were still studying at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal in 2022, and offhandedly suggested that this new group of hers revisit and record the work. The following year, this nascent ensemble would become Quatuor Mémoire.

1. Insides [11:31]
2. Quatuor à cordes no.2 [14:02]
3. Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn [34:18]

With the three works on this album for string quartet performance providing an exciting survey of Montréal’s young generation of composers, their new recording opens on an 11-minute work of nuanced music (Florence Tremblay’s Insides) using rich sound intervals throughout. Inclusive of quarter-tones usage along with esteemed runs of pitch matching to sentence types, the work is for the most part kinetically industrious and a pleasure to behold.

Along next is the polyphonic sound of Louis-Michel Tougas’ Quatuor à cordes no.2, where the 14-minute work soon presents itself as a layered, dutifully expressive piece, both musically textured and at the same time melodiously stirringly. Allowing the work, as a whole, to organically come together, it graciously encourages recurring, distinctive element—like symbolic significances to flow freely to sustain it through to its culmination.

The last work presented is Olivier St-Pierre’s Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn, which refers to the three concepts of time in classical Greek thought: Chronos, objective, immutable and cyclical time; Kairos, the time of opportunity, of action; Aion, the time of eternity, of eternal return.

These emotively rhythmic patterns formulate what is an extraordinary near 35-minute work of musical art, that funnel into a polymorphic serpentine, itself both absorbent and yet teasingly porous in relation to its sequence runs. Here the rhythmic structures fluctuate from rigorous, to flexible to microtonal, and yet at all times a metronomic time is harmonically expressed.

The quartet will also give workshops for student composers at McGill University and participate in a series of workshops around contemporary music creation in partnership with the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur and composer Francis Battah.

www.quatuormemoire.com

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