St Petersburg Quartet To Return For Friends Of Music, September 21

The St Petersburg Quartet is considered by many one of the world’s great chamber ensembles. Their rise to fame has included a Grammy nomination, Best Record honors in both Stereo Review and Gramophone, an opening night performance at Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, a five-year residency at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and hundreds of concerts on many of North America, Europe and Asia’s most prestigious series and festivals.

They opened the 2007-08 Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center quartet series (The New York Times praised their “sumptuous account of Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No.1), and performed with violist Michael Tree of the Guarneri Quartet at the Library of Congress.

Now the quartet is preparing to open the 2008-09 season of concerts sponsored by Newtown Friends of Music. The concert is scheduled for Sunday, September 21, and will feature the St Petersburg String Quartet with guest cellist Roman Mekinulov, a fellow native of Leningrad, the town that was renamed St Petersburg.

This group of Russians is very special to Newtown Friends of Music and its audiences, having received standing ovations and superlative reviews the last times they were in Newtown.

The program will include music by Russian composer Anton Arensky (Quartet No 2 in A minor, Op 35, for violin, viola and two cellos), and also music of Dmitri Shostakovich (Quartet No 7 in F sharp minor, Op 108), and a cello quintet by Franz Schubert.