The Marmen Quartet in Osor on July 28 - the winners from Bordeaux and Banff in a church on Lošinj

The Marmen string quartet play the Church of the Assumption in Osor on July 28, 2026, starting at 9 pm. It is one of those evenings where one of Europe's most decorated young quartets ends up in a church on an Adriatic island instead of a large concert hall, and that is precisely the point of the Osor Music Evenings.

Marmen is a string quartet based in the United Kingdom, with Johannes Marmen and Laia Valentin Braun on violins, Bryony Gibson-Cornish on viola and Sinéad O'Halloran on cello. The quartet was founded in 2013 by Johannes Marmen and Ricky Gore, then violin students at the Royal College of Music in London.

2019 was their turning point: they won the main prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Bordeaux, and in the same year shared first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, where they additionally took the Haydn prize and the prize for the commissioned Canadian composition. In the world of chamber music that combination means the next ten years of your CV are already booked. They have performed at Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boulez Saal in Berlin, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Konserthuset in Stockholm and Milton Court at the Barbican.

The Osor Music Evenings take place in a church whose acoustics tolerate no amplification, and for a quartet that is the hardest possible test, because every lapse in intonation goes straight into the room. Tickets are sold through entrio.hr. For an audience holidaying on the Kvarner, this is a date where the ticket price and the rank of the performers stand in no reasonable proportion at all - in the listener's favour.