Starting off so young has helped the Vogler String Quartet to stay together - and grow even closer over the 23 years they've been performing, writes Michael Dervan.

THE VOGLER String Quartet have been playing together for 23 years now. And for 20 of those years, they have been coming to Ireland. But they actually know each other much longer. Three of them went to the same school in what was then East Berlin, with two of them in the same class from the age of 11 or 12. Unlike many string quartets, they've survived the decades without a single change in membership.

I met up with them in the café of the Berlin Konzerthaus on an unseasonably chilly April afternoon, with everyone complaining about the cold. They had just returned from a US tour, and the change of temperature came as a severe shock. They were in relaxed mood, however, and joked when I asked them first about what had been easy and what had been hard in working together as a quartet. "I don't think anything's been easy," says second violinist Frank Reinecke, the group's most voluble member. "Going home after rehearsals," offered the leader, Tim Vogler.

Then Frank got serious, explaining that it has actually been easy to stay together because playing as a quartet has remained "a great pleasure". They put this down to the fact that they started off so young. None of them had really chalked up an independent achievements before becoming involved in the quartet. "We hadn't developed our personalities yet," says cellist Stephan Forck. "Still haven't," interrupts Frank.

Stephan sees it as important that they all experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall together. "This is something which has quite an impact on the biography. We all experienced it together. Before that, we had studied together in America, which was quite unbelievable for us, coming from the East. Then it all changed. It was quite important for us in growing even closer together." The mention of closeness prompts some musing on the merging of identities that's involved in playing in a string quartet. Frank points to the fact that "four people meet the same person at once. Everything develops at the same time. We met the Ruddocks [John and the late Doreen Ruddock, who promoted their first Irish concert, "our father and mother figures in Ireland"] all four of us, at the same time, all the presenters of concerts. Quartets are exceptional. Everything is experienced together. Invitations for dinners, you always go together. Foreign trips, you do together."

Tim elaborates. "It is sometimes hard that you are regarded as one person. You are asked 'How are you?' in the sense of four, so in German it would be, 'Wie geht's euch?' plural and not 'Wie geht's dir?' how are you, personally. You are always four. If you play a concert tour and you are invited every evening for a reception and for dinner, the rule is that everybody has to go , because the quartet is booked as a quartet and you feel strange if you say I'm not in the mood, or whatever. Or there might be only one car so you have to go there. Or if one of us is in a good mood and is chatting away, the others have to wait, even though they're tired. That can be difficult." And, of course, as Frank points out, "it's hard to have secrets from one another".

AFTER NEARLY A QUARTER of a century, the work routine is still strenuous, though not quite as demanding as in the earlier years. "We always rehearsed every day when we were at home," says Tim. "In the last two years, it's changed a little bit, since we all have families and we have teaching jobs. Now there's a little more flexibility as we know a lot of works. And sometimes it's also nice not to stick together all the time, but prepare yourself individually, because you basically know what the group wants to do together. That's a freedom which comes a little bit more now, and it's nice."

"For the first 15 years," says Stephan, "we probably rehearsed 330 days a year. Most of the rehearsals take four hours, and in the beginning we often did one in the morning and one in the evening." Now, says Frank, "the typical day starts like this, you rehearse by yourself, you warm up at home, if you don't get up too late. You go to rehearsal, a four-hour rehearsal. You go home. And in the evening, if you have the nerve, of course, you have to prepare a little more for the next rehearsal." The group's appetite for work sounds formidable, and there have been times on tour when they have simply rehearsed too much, especially in getting too warmed-up in a pre-concert rehearsal. "You play better when you are fresh, and maybe not actually feeling as well warmed up," says Frank.

In the early days, they spent a lot of time on groundwork, intonation, basic sound, rhythm. Now their concern is to develop a deeper understanding of the music. "If you repeat something which you might have done a few years earlier," says Tim, "then it's a process of getting it out, getting it back, getting the dust off, whatever. Then you compare the impression you have of the piece now, not just do it as you played it in the past, but to have a fresh view on it. This may include technical things as simple as fingerings or bowings, or conception, dynamics, whatever. Then you rehearse, you play, you compare the old impression with the new impression. There's a change. It's quite a creative process." For Frank, one of the great changes has been his relationship with one of Beethoven's late quartets, the one in E flat, Op. 127, which for years he used to feel uncomfortable with. Now it's all begun to work for him, and "I feel a special joy playing it, it's more my piece".

In terms of disputes, a group of four could easily end up with a lot of split votes. That's never been an issue for the Voglers, no matter what the argument is about. Most of the time, says Tim, it's one against three, and, happily, it's not the same person in the minority all the time.

"For myself," he says, "I feel very secure about my opinion, and the next day I feel different. And I think it's the same for most of us. We have arguments preparing a piece, we don't play it for three years, then we rehearse it again, and if you have an argument about one particular place, the next morning you remember you had exactly the same argument three years before."

Viola-player Stefan Fehlandt, the group's quiet man, here makes one of his few interjections. "Some things like fingerings and bowing and tempo can be solved by just trying them out," he says. In any case, it seems that in the bigger scheme of things, the differences are not all that great. "It's interesting," says Frank, "that when we teach together, four of us sitting together, we all basically say the same thing. Our ideas about music have grown together over the 23 years." Just to be complete, I ask if there's anything they never argue about. "Well," says Frank, "the fees are always too low, of course."

LOOKING BACK, I ASK them which occasions or achievements stand out. For Tim, it's a matter of getting "more and more a sense of personal freedom, to do what we do, not because we have to do it, but because we like to do it. And the more time goes, to be master of the métier, to know exactly what you want to do and know how to achieve it."

Frank expresses his experience of freedom differently, saying that he's developed "more freedom through having less fear, that things are not being measured against others, or having the feeling that you couldn't play Mozart or you couldn't play Beethoven. I have more and more the feeling that everything is possible, that everything gets easier and becomes part of a bigger picture."

Unlike Tim, he recalls a particular performance, "one that was special and touched all of us was here in Berlin, in this building, with the cellist Boris Pergamenschikow, who died shortly afterwards. It was his last concert. But nobody could have known that. We didn't even know how ill he was. But there was something about that concert that really gave me shivers down the spine in the Schubert String Quintet."

Stephan focuses on the way the members have always supported each other. "When you live together as a quartet, there are so many possibilities. It happens that in rehearsal you hurt each other, you are not nice to each other. It could be that in such a situation you pay back. But it never happened. When one of us had a serious problem, we got strong support from the group."

The quiet Stefan recalls the difficulty of working through all of the repertoire for the first time, cherishing the development of the group, and taking succour from the collegial support. "Now I'm coming very late to the stage where I more and more look forward to the next occasion. For me, personally, it takes a lot of effort, emotional effort, in every performance. So that seemed sometimes like the end, that I had gone so far I couldn't see anything else, because I'd already put so much into it. Over the years, it's been interesting how to deal with going on. And now I enjoy it much more."

The Voglers have taken their experience as quartet in residence in Sligo to bear on their work in Germany. They founded a festival for children in Kassel, and have started a movement of Kindermusiktage, of children's music days. It's partly a response to the issue of ageing audiences. "Thanks to Sligo," says Stephan, "we developed the skills for it. I gave the DVD of the project to a lady in Kassel, and from there came the idea to start these Kindermusiktage. It's a copy of what we did in Sligo, of course not an exact copy, but the idea is the same. Now we have this society to support Kindermusiktage all over Germany. It will happen in Berlin, in Halle, in Weimar, and it's already been done in Munich. The pattern is a quartet goes to a school. We don't do it all ourselves, we've asked other quartets to be involved."

Back in 1998, when the Sligo residency was announced, everyone could see what Sligo was going to gain from Berlin. But who would have predicted that Sligo would be exporting back to Germany?

The Vogler Spring Festival runs at St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, Co Sligo, until Monday, www.sligoarts.ie