Transcend is the Australian String Quartet final 2015 concert in Canberra

Gandel Hall at the National Gallery of Australia has proved to be an appealing venue for performances by the Australian String Quartet and on Sunday, November 1, the ensemble will be joined there by award-winning Australian soprano Allison Bell in a very special concert, the culmination of the group's 30th anniversary.

Brett Dean's String Quartet No.2 And Once I Played Ophelia, co-commissioned by the ASQ, the Britten Sinfonia and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival will have its Australian premiere performance at the concert.

The work consists of five short movements. Violist Stephen King says: "The singer is integrated into an incredible sound world throughout. The text is from Hamlet and follows Ophelia slowly losing her grip on reality."

Allison Bell has been described as having a stratospheric voice, a singer whose technical prowess and vocal agility perfectly suits the work. Dean is a great favourite of the ASQ, having collaborated with the quartet many times over the years. In May last year The Guardian's music critic wrote: "As Dean writes, Shakespeare's 'ministering angel' casts a beguiling spell over us. If this was his aim with this taut, refined work, he has succeeded."

The concert will begin with a work by the Spanish Basque composer Juan Crisostomo de Arriaga, often referred to as "the Spanish Mozart", a man who shared the same birthday as Mozart although 50 years later, and who was also a child prodigy who died young. His String Quartet No. 3 in E flat major, published in 1824, was one of only three of his works published during his lifetime. It is described as a work full of elegance and warmth.

Schubert's masterwork, String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D810, (Death and the Maiden), will be the concert's final work. This is a perfect work to show the character and presence of each of the quartet's instruments, an advance from Schubert's earlier quartets where the first violin usually dominated the piece. It's a real showpiece to present the voices of each of the ASQ's matched Guadagnini instruments.

For this concert Sophie Rowell will join the quartet as guest first violinist. She is a former ASQ member and is now associate concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Newly appointed second violinist, Francesca Hiew, violist King and cellist Sharon Draper will join her for the Transcend tour.

The quartet's 2016 tour begins next February – a new-look ensemble with Dale Barltrop assuming the position of first violin and joining King, Hiew and Draper in repertoire that extends from classic Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann to a new work by Australian composer Matthew Hindson for strings and percussion, excerpts from John's Book of Alleged Dances by John Adams, featuring the incredible percussionist Claire Edwardes, and String Quartet No.1 Tempesta by contemporary composer/pianist Joe Chindamo.

King says: "What is really exciting is that we will be bringing all of our national season tours to Canberra from 2016 onwards. It is a great time for us to be branching out and extending our national reach and we love playing a Sunday afternoon in the warm acoustic of Gandel Hall. It is a great-sized space to experience the fresh vitality of the group with a stunning selection of works for our first season. I have always felt that the Australian String Quartet should be regular visitors to Canberra, especially having grown up there."

Next year's Canberra concerts will take place on Sunday afternoons at 2pm on March 6, July 3 and October 16. Subscription packages are now available with a booking form included online at www.asq.com.au or available by phoning 1800 040 444. As an added incentive subscriptions bought before November 16 this year will go into a draw to win a private dinner with the ASQ in 2016.