Doric String Quartet

The Doric String Quartet swiftly built a profile defined by both refinement and range, encompassing core repertoire as well as recent works for the medium while forging partnerships with musicians outside conventional chamber-music circles. Established in the closing years of the 1990s, the ensemble joined the roster of Britain’s Young Classical Artists Trust in 2006, an organization dedicated to supporting emerging performers. During the final years of that decade it secured multiple significant awards, among them top honors at the 2008 Osaka International Chamber Music Competition, and began a long association with London’s Wigmore Hall; a 2009 release on the hall’s own imprint preserved its readings of three Haydn quartets. In 2010 the group issued its first Chandos recording, devoted to quartets by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and has since maintained an extensive association with the label. European engagements have included the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, and De Singel in Antwerp, with additional appearances at leading festivals across several countries. American concerts have taken the players to New York’s Frick Museum and the Library of Congress in Washington.

Strong reviews greeted its Chandos discs of Walton’s cycle, Schumann’s quartets, and a Janáček–Martinů program. In 2017 the Doric String Quartet set down Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and Orchestra with the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner. The ensemble has explored other scores written for the same quartet-plus-orchestra format, performing John Adams’s Absolute Jest with the Vienna Symphony at the Konzerthaus under the composer’s direction, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Concertgebouw, and with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which it later joined for a 2018 recording of the piece. Two volumes of Mendelssohn’s quartets appeared on Chandos in 2018 and 2021; the latter year also brought the first installment of a Mozart cycle and a collection of British oboe quintets with Nicholas Daniel. At that point the label’s Doric catalog exceeded twenty releases.