On April 24, Günter Pichler, a founding member and the first violinist of the Alban Berg Quartet, died at the age of 85. Here, Krzysztof Chorzelski, the violist of the Belcea Quartet, remembers the great musician who was his mentor. When I was a teenager living in Poland, I discovered the Alban Berg Quartet’s recording […]
Tag: Strings
Posted inProfile
What’s Left to Do
In January, Scottish guitarist Sean Shibe realized he’d been overdoing it. In February, he had a health scare—a false alarm, but one that nonetheless prompted him to book time off and reevaluate his working habits. For almost a decade now, he has been the definition of an artist in a hurry, releasing nine albums since 2017 (counting “Vesper,” […]
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The Energy of the Moment
A train chugs along rhythmically, accompanied by otherworldly birds. Lazy chords blossom, like flowers from another world. A chaotic burbling morphs into an endless, glistening haze. These are just a few of the images conjured by “Escape Rites,” an album featuring several new works by JACK Quartet violinist Austin Wulliman. The works range from pensive […]
Posted inBarTálk
The Thirty-Year Itch
“Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it,” the English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have told a cellist during a rehearsal. The quip is still played for laughs, dredged up by the likes of Classic FM (“The best […]
Posted inInterview
Learning Culture
Brendan Slocumb’s goal is to be the “Stephen King of musical mysteries.” In the last three years, he has published three mystery novels with Penguin Random House: The Violin Conspiracy (2022), Symphony of Secrets (2023), and The Dark Maestro (forthcoming in May). The protagonists of all three novels are classical musicians, and all three plots […]
Posted inHistory
An Encounter with Distance
Pau Casals wrote letters as he played the cello: with conviction and exacting care. An epistolophile to the core, he wove a web of correspondences through what Eric Hobsbawm called the “short 20th century,” an era of war and upheaval that shattered the 19th century’s bourgeois order. His letters, exchanged with a fluid cast of […]
Posted inInterview
For an Idea
The Russian invasion of Ukraine forced the music world to reckon urgently with its naïveté towards the country’s imperial ambitions. Looking back, it remains shocking just how willing the field was to ignore, for instance, Valery Gergiev’s aggressive pro-Kremlin propaganda. The violinist Lisa Batiashvili, in contrast, was prophetically clearsighted, and willing to take action, too. […]
Posted inInterview
Switch Sounds Upside Down
Ron Carter is one of the titanic bassists in the history of jazz. Raised in Detroit, he started playing the cello, then added the bass, training as a classical musician at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and then the Manhattan School of Music. While still studying, he started playing jazz in […]
Posted inInterview
A Very Private Sense of Fear
It would be customary for a performer of James Ehnes’s stature—internationally touring and highly in-demand, with four records released in 2024, residencies in Australia and Seattle, and a recent credit on a “Star Wars” miniseries—to be precious with their time. And those who have heard, whether on record or live, his ability to imbue and […]
Posted inEssay
Fall In Love Again and Again
It is no exaggeration to say that Antonio Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece “The Four Seasons” changed the course of my life. Vivaldi’s monumental homage to the natural world is a work resplendent with fantasy, storytelling, tunes one can hum after a single listen, and particularly exquisite writing for the violin. Ostensibly a vehicle to show off […]