Doric String Quartet

The Doric String Quartet has quickly established a reputation for quality and versatility, recording both mainstream and contemporary string quartet music and collaborating with other artists beyond the chamber music sphere.
Formed in the late 1990s, the group came under the umbrella of Britain’s Young Classical Artists Trust, a charity devoted to nurturing young talent, in 2006. It won several major prizes in the late-2000s decade, including a first-place finish at the 2008 Osaka International Chamber Music Competition, and made the first of many appearances at London’s Wigmore Hall, where its performances of three Haydn quartets was released on the hall’s own label in 2009. The following year, the Doric String Quartet released its debut on the Chandos label, an album of quartets by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and since then, it has recorded prolifically for that label. The group has performed in top European concert halls: the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, and De Singel in Antwerp, among others. In the U.S., likewise, the quartet has appeared in choice venues: New York’s Frick Museum and the Library of Congress in Washington. It is a fixture of festivals in a number of European countries.
The quartet’s recordings on Chandos — among them those of Walton's cycle, of Schumann's string quartets, and of a Janácek-Martinu album — earned strong critical praise. In 2017, the Doric String Quartet released a recording of Elgar's Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and Orchestra, with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Edward Gardner. The group has taken up several compositions for the unusual combination of string quartet and orchestra. It has performed John Adams’ Absolute Jest with the Vienna Symphony at the Vienna Konzerthaus with Adams conducting, with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic at the Concertgebouw, and with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; the quartet recorded the work with the latter group in 2018. The Doric String Quartet recorded the string quartets of Mendelssohn in two volumes in 2018 and 2021, and the latter year saw the release of two more albums by the group, the first in a cycle of Mozart quartets, and an album of British oboe quintets featuring Nicholas Daniel. By that time, the quartet’s Chandos catalog included more than 20 items. ~ James Manheim