The Revolutionary Drawing Room is a string quartet that performs late 18th- and 19th-century repertoire with a sound derived from the beauty and flexibility of gut strings.
The name ‘Revolutionary Drawing Room’ refers to the revolutionary years in Europe between 1789 and 1848. The ‘drawing room’ (the name deriving from the earlier ‘withdrawing room’) was where chamber music was performed in Georgian times, in the houses of musicians and their patrons. The political upheavals of the time were matched by a breathless pace of change and the forging of new styles, forms and tastes both in the music and in the instruments used. The quartet use original bows, or modern copies, and often employ more than one in a concert depending on the range of repertoire.
The quartet, including current Churchill By-Fellow Rachel Stott, will perform Betthoven’s Op. 132, which will be broadcast over Zoom live from the Churchill Recital Room. Whilst we cannot promise this will precisely match the experience of enjoying music live at the performance venue, we do hope it will offer some relief to those who have been starved of live musical performance during the pandemic.
The ensemble, founded in 1990, has performed in Canada, Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark and Ireland, as well as across the UK, and has recorded for CPO (Donizetti and Boccherini quartets) and the BBC (Mendelssohn Octet). Recent appearances have included concerts in the Gregynog, Maldon and Petworth Festivals and the London BachFest and they are currently performing a complete cycle of Beethoven’s Quartets over four years at St. John’s, Smith Square. In July 2017 they played in the Music and Beyond Festival in Ottawa, Canada, with three concerts featuring Beethoven’s Op. 18 quartets, and a ‘Soirée’ appearance at the National Gallery of Canada. Recordings include Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet with Colin Lawson on the Clarinet Classics label, and ‘A Viennese Quartet Party’ on Omnibus Classics, a new double-CD of flute quartets by Mozart and his contemporaries with Rachel Brown was released in September 2016 on the Uppernote label.
This talk will be broadcast live as a Zoom webinar, so your microphone and camera will be turned off throughout.