Juilliard String Quartet

Nick Eanet, violin ~ Ronald Copes, violin ~ Samuel Rhodes, viola ~ Joel Krosnick, cello

Photo credit: Vanessa Briceño-Scherzer
Click on image to enlarge.

"Each of the four has a notably beautiful tone, a sound that sings out but also blends. They show a shared understanding of the music they play; every bow stroke adds to its meaning and its integrity."
~ Chicago Tribune

"Whether playing Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok or Carter, the Juilliard Quartet remains unsurpassed in bringing attention to details and expressive devices."
~ Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The Juilliard String Quartet, in its more than 50 years, has made it a point of honor to approach contemporary pieces with the same care and respect as it would established classics, and to approach antique masterworks with the sense of excitement and adventure it would the newly minted."
~ New York Times

“From the outset at Campbell Hall, the Juilliard was in high form, delivering the Haydn with requisite lucidity, but also a certain rough-and-ready energy.“ - Haydn Op. 20, No. 6, Bartok 2, Mozart Quintet K.593, The Santa Barbara News-Press, April 19, 2010

“Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135, replacing an earlier announced Schumann quartet, was the evening’s highpoint. This work exuded an airy, sunny disposition atypical of late Beethoven. Passages were performed cleanly and enticingly, with a hint of humor.“ - Schubert D.804 , Bartok 2, Beethoven Op.135, The Kalamazoo Gazette, March 21, 2010

“[Nick Eanet] sounded thoroughly at home here, not just blending in with violinist Ronald Copes, violist Samuel Rhodes and cellist Joel Krosnick, but making richly detailed music with them. There was a dynamic warmth to the performance of Mendelssohn‘s D major Quartet (Op. 44, No. 1), a sense of spontaneity in the beautifully molded phrasing.“ - Mendelssohn, Davidowsky, Schumann, Shriver Hall Concert Series, The Baltimore Sun, December 8, 2009

“From the first bars of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet (D. 804), which opened the program, you could see why Mr. Eanet won the position. His tone in the graceful solo violin line that runs through the first two movements was consistently warm and rounded, and his phrasing approximated what an expressive, well-trained singer would do with Schubert’s gently arching melody...Where Schubert puts the first violin in the spotlight much of the time, the Bartok and Beethoven works are closer to the chamber music ideal of equally balanced lines. Here the Juilliard players sounded rejuvenated, if not necessarily cheerful: they made the tensions of Bartok’s unsettled Second Quartet sound vivid and personal, as though the work reflected their own anxieties as much as the depression and disorientation that Bartok felt when he composed the work, during World War I. Just as striking, in the finale they moved between acridity and warmth, and made the transitions seem easy.“ - Schubert D.804, Bartok 2, Beethoven Op. 135, Allan Kozinn for The New York Times, December 3, 2009

“Beethoven‘s Op. 135 shows the composer, after years of gradual retreat from the outside world, expressing his own brand of hard-won resolution. Most performers are heard probing the piece from the outside; the Juilliard reading exuded inside understanding, particularly in the pulsating slow movement.“ - Schubert D.804, Bartok 2, Beethoven Op. 135, David Patrick Stearns for The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 2009

“[Mendelssohn’s D Major quartet] was manna for the Juilliard, who unleashed a musical charm offensive, scintillating and virtuosic.“ - Schumann Op.41, No.3, Davidovsky No.5, Mendelssohn Op.44, No.1, The Boston Globe, October 27, 2009

“The Juilliards brought a depth of tone and a wealth of inflection that suited the music exceedingly well. There is a complexity of texture in a group with a history as long and layered as this one’s. You can hear, as it were, the generations mingling; it’s a little like being able to pick out the individual spices in a sauce while also tasting the blend as a blend.“ - Mendelssohn, Davidowsky, Schumann at San Francisco Performances, San Francisco Classical Voice, October 18, 2009

“At Saturday‘s concert, Eanet was an assured, engaging leader capable of meltingly lyrical playing... Throughout the program, including Beethoven‘s final string quartet, Op. 135, in F Major, elegance, nuance, structural intricacies (in the Beethoven) and a genuine interest in the interior emotional life of the music prevailed over blunderbuss bravado. The three veterans played as if their musical lives are blooming anew.“ - Da Camera of Houston w/Sarah Rothenberg, The Houston Chronicle, October 5, 2009

“The Juilliard maintains its risk-taking approach, as well as its uncommon intensity, keen absorption and singleness of purpose during each piece...The Juilliard showed Mendelssohn at his most luminous and impetuous, giving to the work as a whole an impassioned tenderness, at times veiled in somber shadows – even in the teasing second movement.“ - Mendelssohn, Dutilleux and Ravel at the Kennedy Center, The Washington Post, December 8, 2008

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Haydn Op. 20, No. 6, Bartok 2, Mozart Quintet K.593, The Santa Barbara News-Press (April 19, 2010)