Fitzwilliam Quartet

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The Fitzwilliam Quartet

Lucy Russell - violin Jonathan Sparey - violin Alan George - viola Andrew Skidmore - 'cello

Biography

Founded in 1968 by four Cambridge undergraduates, the Fitzwilliam was one of the first of a long line of distinguished quartets to have emerged under the guidance of Sidney Griller at the Royal Academy of Music. They originally 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 gained many international awards, and secured for the quartet a worldwide concert schedule and a long term contract with Decca / London.

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

Extremely generous private patronage has made possible a new collaboration with Linn Records, which began in May 2000 with Haydn’s Seven Last Words. Recordings continued with the Brahms clarinet quintet together with clarinettist Lesley Schatzberger. They have also made a disc of 20th cent English songs with piano quintet (including Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge), in which they collaborated with James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook;

Recent travels have taken them all over the world to places such as the USA, South Africa, Slovenia, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, China and India.