Piatti Quartet

Frequently recognized through competition victories and regular recital engagements, the Piatti Quartet ranks among Britain’s distinguished chamber groups, maintaining an active focus on new music. The ensemble takes its name from the nineteenth-century cellist Alfredo Piatti, who served for decades on the faculty of the Royal Academy of Music. Its personnel comprise violinists Michael Trainor and Rebecca Chan, who exchange the first- and second-violin roles as needed, violist Tetsuumi Nagata, and cellist Jessie Ann Richardson. Advanced training for the quartet was supported by both a Hattori Foundation Award and a Martin Musical/Philharmonia Scholarship Fund grant. In its formative period the group accumulated an array of prizes, among them first place at the 2011 St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Music Competition, the contest’s opening edition. Three years later the quartet issued its first recording on the Linn Records label, presenting chamber reductions of three Mozart piano concertos alongside pianist Gottlieb Wallisch. A decisive advance followed in 2015 when the ensemble captured second prize overall, together with several category awards, at the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition; one distinction was the Sidney Griller Award for its interpretation of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Contusion. This achievement reinforced an ongoing dedication to contemporary repertoire that has already led to collaborations with leading British composers such as Simon Holt, Freya Waley-Cohen, and Darren Bloom. Additional artistic partnerships have included tenor Ian Bostridge, tenor Nicky Spence, clarinetist Michael Collins, and pianist Janina Fialkowska. Festival and hall appearances have taken the quartet to the L’Orangerie Musée in Paris, the National Concert Hall in Dublin, and Antoni Gaudí’s La Pedrera in Barcelona. Projected engagements for the opening years of the 2020s encompassed a first visit to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and further performances at Wigmore Hall and the Aldeburgh Festival. In 2021 the group participated in a recording of Gavin Higgins’s chamber music; the next year it recorded Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge for tenor, piano, and string quartet with Spence and pianist Timothy Ridout on the Hyperion label, while also preparing to launch a recorded cycle devoted to Turnage’s output that begins with the newly commissioned String Quartet No. 4 (“Winter’s Edge”). Beyond concert work, members of the quartet hold teaching posts at Trinity Laban, the Royal Academy of Music, and Purcell School and present outreach programs in primary schools.