Fine Arts Quartet News
chamber music ensemble founded in Chicago, United States in 1946 by Leonard Sorkin and George Sopkin
- Ensemble
- United States of America
streaming
Last update
2024-03-28
Refresh
2024-01-25 04:30:00
Recent Releases No. 69 (CD Reviews)
by Karl NehringMozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 19 and 25 (orchestra parts transcribed for string quartet and double bass by Ignaz Lachner). Alon Goldstein, piano; Fine Arts Quartet (Ralph Evans, violin I; Efim Boico, violin II; Gil Sharon, viola; Niklas Schmidt, cello); Lizzie Burns, double bass. Naxos 8.574477Pianist Alon Goldstein remarks of these two particular pieces that they are his personal favorites from among all of Mozart’s piano concertos, then goes on to explain about the arrangements in which they appear on this recording: “Rearrangement of music was very common in the 18th and 19th centuries. The composer and conductor Ignaz Lachner rearranged 19 Mozart concertos, including the two featured on this recording for piano and string quartet with double bass, most likely for the simple pleasure of domestic use m—having the opportunity to play these beloved works without the need of a full orchestra.” Surely the vast majority of those reading this review are […]
2021-02-04 06:37:00
Saint-Saens: Piano Quintet in A minor, Op. 10 (CD review)
[…] spirited, but with enough musical interest to hold attention.There are plenty of performances of this work out there, so let me pick just a couple for comparison. The Quatuor Girard plays nicely, although slightly less energetically and dynamically than the Cremona crew. To my ears, though, they are sabotaged by an over-reverberant recording that obscures some of the passage work, and sound that tends to collapse onto the speakers in the more dynamic passages. The Fine Arts Quartet plays well and offers both the first and second quartets on a Naxos disk for those who crave completeness. Their account of the first is not so highly strung as that that of the Cremona players; for example, the Quartetto plays the second movement much faster than the Fine Arts group, at the same time really digging in to their instruments, so much so that returning from the Naxos disk to this […]
2020-01-16 00:00:00
Bach - The Art of Fugue: Robert Simpson, Delmé SQ, Les Voix Humanes, Kimiko Ishizaka and The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
[…] devised to provide context for its traditional December traversals of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos — with a performance of “The Art of Fugue” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. The Orion String Quartet and the wind quintet Windscape, nine of the finest musicians on the society’s roster, used an arrangement made in the early 1960s by the flutist Samuel Baron for the New York Woodwind Quintet, of which he was a member, and the Fine Arts Quartet.This concert was as much a tribute to Mr. Baron’s ingenuity as to Bach’s original vision, whatever it might have been. Mr. Baron’s combinations of modern strings and winds, however “inauthentic,” served the work with unfailing musicality.True, the first 11 fugues felt more illustrative than inspirational. The music unfurled at a stately pace and, for the most part, a comfortable mezzo forte volume. Mr. Baron’s instrumental combinations illuminated Bach’s supreme logic as melodic […]
Norman Lebrecht - Slipped disc
2019-03-01 08:22:29
A Fine Arts second violinist has died
Following the death of Jerry Horner, we hear that Abram Loft, second violinist of the Fine Arts Quartet from 1954...