Thursday, March 22, 2007

References in Feb. '07 Chamber Music

Del Sol is mentioned three times in the February 2007 issue (Vol. 24, No. 1) of Chamber Music magazine.

"A Midwestern Modernist" by James M. Keller, an article about Ruth Crawford Seeger
p. 67 talks about Crawford's String Quartet 1931, Andante movement as
“one I would recommend wholeheartedly is provided by the Del Sol String Quartet, a San Francisco foursome steeped in bravery and imagination.” He refers to Tear as “the group’s mind-expanding sampler CD.” He goes on to describe how Del Sol plays the movement faster than “any of the competition; ... [which] allows for a more fluid fluctuation among the constant waxing and waning of the four instruments...[T]he Del Sols’ result is grippingly otherworldly rather than just scrawny, and their ghostly timbre is abetted by an unusually vivid recorded acoustic. I hope we may look forward to their recording of this work in its entirety.”

p. 63, picture of Tear CD jacket
Click here for more info on Tear

"The Kronos Tradition" by Frank Otieri, p. 41
"In today's chamber music landscape — where quartets ranging from the Cassatt, Del Sol[emphasis added], Lark and Pacifica to genre-defying ensembles such as Ethel and Invert perform new music extensively and in some cases exclusively — it's difficult to remember the pre-Kronos idea of what a string quartet was or could be."