The Chaos String Quartet will perform Battleground by Jan-Peter de Graaff at the Kammermusikfest Lockenhaus in Austria on 8 and 9 July.

Battleground was composed for the 2025 Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale as part of the project ‘Een flat met 1000 ramen’. In this project, six composers created contemporary responses to Joseph Haydn’s six Opus 20 quartets, combined with a narrative by Joke van Leeuwen.

De Graaff wrote Battleground as a musical commentary on Haydn’s second quartet (Opus 20). The piece is built on two specific motifs from Haydn: the trills from the second movement and the fugue theme from the fourth movement.

The narrative follows a young student and her emotionally unreachable father, a war photographer. As she yearns for a connection, she even considers joining him on his next trip to a warzone. In this setting, Haydn’s quartet symbolizes the father’s world, while Battleground represents the inner world and imagination of the daughter.