Biography

Luri Lee  -  violin             
Jason Issokson  -  violin   
Hezekiah Leung  -  viola           
Yoshi Masuda  -  cello

The Rolston String Quartet was formed in the summer of 2013 at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s Chamber Music Residency. It takes its name from Canadian violinist Thomas Rolston, founder and long-time director of the Music and Sound Programs at the Banff Centre. In 2016 the Rolston String Quartet won First Prize at the 12th Banff International String Quartet Competition. The group has undertaken two major Canadian tours and three European tours. Last November, the Quartet’s debut recording entitled Souvenirs was released on the Fuga Libera label. Three months later, it was selected by BBC Music Magazine as a Recording of the Month. Commenting on the all-Tchaikovsky program, critic Eric Levi wrote that ‘This beautifully recorded debut release confirms not only the Rolston String Quartet’s superb technical accomplishment and their impeccably blended sound, but also a maturity of interpretative approach that can only be achieved after long and patient engagement with the music.’

www.Rolston String Quartet

Notes

No composer contributed more to the development of the string quartet than Haydn. His eighty-some works in this genre stand, both in quantity and quality, as a monument in the history of music. The quartet we hear today dates from 1793, a year that reflects a new direction in Haydn’s string quartet writing. As in his late symphonies, Haydn now usually begins with an introduction of some sort. Textures are denser and richer, and contrasts are more pronounced, resulting in a more symphonic character than before. Even the very tone of these works takes its cue from the world of the symphony: this is not private, intimate music for the salon, but grand, public music for the concert hall. Opus 74 No. 3 takes its nickname (but not from the composer) from the rapid pulsing and galloping figures in the finale, suggesting a horse and rider in full flight.

If Beethoven’s six quartets Opus 18 showed him paying tribute to the musical world he had inherited from Haydn and Mozart, the three Opus 59 quartets of 1806 reveal him as a totally individualistic, fully mature artist. The first of these is not only one of the longest of Beethoven’s sixteen works in the genre, but significantly more difficult to perform than any written to date, by Beethoven or anyone else. In its sense of power, unity of construction, breadth of ideas, and range of emotions, it has been compared to the Eroica Symphony. All four movements are in sonata form, a rarity in any age.

Robert Markow