Fitzwilliam String Quartet

Fitzwilliam String Quartet

Founded in 1968 by four Cambridge (England) undergraduates, the Fitzwilliam String Quartet first became well known through their close personal association with Dmitri Shostakovich, who befriended them following a visit to York to hear them play. He entrusted them with the Western premières of his last three quartets, and before long they had become the first ever group to perform and record all fifteen. These recordings, which gained many international awards, secured for them a worldwide concert schedule, and a long term contract with Decca/London which culminated in a Beethoven cycle. Indeed, the Shostakovich set was included in Gramophone magazine's "Hundred Greatest-ever Recordings" in November 2005.

They are one of the few string quartets in the world to use Classical instruments for the appropriate repertoire, and perhaps unique in that they perform on both historical and modern set-ups - sometimes within the same concert!

In July 2001 they made their first ever trip to South Africa, where they gave two concerts in the National Arts Festival at Grahamstown (the second largest in the world, after Edinburgh) - including the world première of Michael Blake's first quartet. That experience also initiated a renewed interest in contemporary music, which has resulted in nearly thirty additions to the new century's repertoire.

Their trip to the USA in February 2006 included a marathon three-hour event in Lorin Maazel's private concert hall at his farm near the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. They have been invited to make tours to China and India, and 2006 saw return visits to Spain, Switzerland, the USA, and to Russia for the Shostakovich centenary celebrations. Indeed, it was this special anniversary which, not surprisingly, was at the centre of their activities that year.