Hans van Manen’s celebrated choreography of Benjamin Britten’s early String Quartet in F is in rep at the Hamburg Ballett from April to June 2026, receiving eight performances. Appearing as part of Variations for two couples Britten’s music appears alongside that of Rautavaara, Bach, and Piazzolla. The work, first conceived for Dutch National Ballet in 2012, saw van Manen – who passed away in December 2025 – inspired by two dancing pairs, each with a very different character: the first lyrical and subdued, the second scintillatingly virtuosic.
The 1928 String Quartet in F is imbued with youthful energies across much of its 22-minute span, though tempered by a dark ending in F minor and an emotionally ambiguous slow movement, foreshadowing the emotional complexity of his later quartets. One of Britten’s early works and written under the supervision of his teacher Frank Bridge, it was not published until 1995. The work shows the clear influences of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F major, Op.18/6, the score of which Britten was gifted around the same time.
In 2024/25 the choreography was mounted by the San Francisco Ballet as part of San Francisco Ballet’s four-part portrait of the Dutch’s choreographer’s work Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster. It previously appeared in San Francisco in 2014, and was also danced at the Philadelphia Ballet in 2022. In 2012 it received the Benois de la Danse.
Britten’s works for string quartet, including the String Quartet in F, were also recently choreographed by William Yong for the National Ballet of Canda’s UtopiVerse, which received its world premiere in March 2024. Read an interview with Yong about the project here. Yong and Music Director David Briskin selected three works by Benjamin Britten to illuminate this exploration: String Quartet No.3 (1975), the String Quartet in F (1928), and the brisk, single-movement Alla Marcia (1933). Both Briskin and Yong saw in the music’s rich emotional spectrum to an apt mirror for the complex states of mind the ballet examines.