Finzi Quartet
Biography Finzi Quartet
Finzi Quartet
Prize winners in the 2010 Royal Over Seas League Competition and the 5th Trondheim International String Quartet Competition in Norway, the Finzi Quartet has given recitals and made numerous festival appearances at major venues throughout the UK and Europe, including London’s Wigmore Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Auditorio Sony in Madrid.
The Quartet enjoys regular collaborations with several international guest artists and is fortunate to have worked with many inspirational musicians including, Hatto Beyerle, Valentin Erben, Andras Keller, Johannes Meissl, Heime Muller, Gabor Takacs-Nagy, Christoph Richter, and Thomas Riebl.
As selected artists the Quartet has also benefited from the support of the Tillett Trust, Park Lane Group, the Tunnell Trust, the Kirckman Concerts Society, the Swiss Global Artistic Foundation and the Hattori Foundation.
Among the highlights of 2010 were appearances on BBC Radio 3’s ‘In Tune’ and on Viennese Radio as winners of the Austrian ‘Wiener Klassik Prize’ for their interpretation of quartets by Joseph Haydn, a second Aldeburgh Residency and a recording of Sir John Tavener’s Towards Silence for Signum Records. The Quartet also enjoys a continuing collaboration with Northern Irish composer Deirdre Gribbin through its recital series at St Anne and St Agnes Lutheran Church in the City of London. Major festival engagements during 2011 included the Brighton, Salisbury and Edinburgh Festivals and, following the success of their Tunnell Trust Young Artist Tour of Scotland, the Quartet will make several return tours in 2012 and 2013 in association with Enterprise Music Scotland.
Future projects include performances of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Virgil Thomson’s Stabat Mater with soprano Sarah Gabriel, Schubert’s C major Quintet with cellists Christoph Richter and Gary Hoffman and concerts in Menorca for the Fundcacion Fidah. The Quartet will also feature in the Harrogate and Cheltenham Festivals, and will give a series of concerts in France as part of their ongoing collaboration with ProQuartet.
The Quartet is actively involved in education and outreach projects, working regularly with Live Music Now and the CAVATINA chamber Music Trust. Following its appointment as Bulldog Junior Fellows at Trinity College of Music for 2009/2010, the Quartet currently holds a Leverhulme Fellowship at the Royal Northern College of Music.
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
Finzi was an English composer of Italian and Jewish background. Born in 1901, he began to be known for his works during the 1920s and 1930s. He set his favorite poet Thomas hardy’s words to music with By Footpath and Stile (1921-1922), A Young Man’s Exhortation (1926-1929), and Earth and Air and Rain (1928-1932). His other words included Dies Natalis from the 1920s and 30s, the anthem Lo, The Full, Final Sacrifice (1946), his setting of Woodsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimation of Immortality" (1950), as well as the Clarinet Concerto (1948-1949), and Cello Concerto (1951-1952, 1954-1955). His other works include the melancholy Eclogue from 1929 (a slow movement of an unfinished piano concerto).
