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Press Acclaim
"Brilliant….the performance showed not only virtuosity, intelligence and imagination but also extraordinary passion."
The New York Times
”A rare gift for combining interpretive spontaneity and fierce musical commitment.”
The New York Times
“Impassioned performances full of operatic lyricism and structural insight”
The New Yorker
“These are fearless musicians whose spontaneity stretches past conventional interpretation and probes the music's imaginative limits.”
The Washington Post
“An almost disturbing intensity that held the audience spellbound. The performance bristled with the electricity the ensemble has become known for…This was an almost impeccable, powerful performance, with entrances coordinated with absolute precision, sharply etched phrases and carefully judged silences…remarkable.”
The New York Times
”Superb…enthralling and terrifying…an outstanding performance.”
The Boston Globe
“A sound that has just about everything one wants from a quartet, most notably precision, warmth and an electricity that conveys the excitement of playing whatever is on their stands at the moment.”
The New York Times
“A freshness and élan rich in the very lightness of being…the St. Lawrence Quartet made a convincing case for being the top quartet of the post-Emerson generation.”
MusicalAmerica.com (Wes Blomster)
“Faultless, instantly compelling performances….Forget its "youth culture" image; if the St. Lawrence can build on this brilliant debut, a great future surely awaits.”
BBC Music Magazine [Awarded 5 stars]
“Here is a young ensemble that plays with all the energy and fearless adventurousness of youth…The string tone is deep and urgent, with a gritty edge that doesn't impede an underlying air of elegance. Best of all is the vitality…exciting and unpredictable."
San Francisco Chronicle
“Expressive tension was unrelenting, even in the still, shivering harmonics of the first movement. The performance had a dangerous, unchecked edge; I have never heard anything quite like it.”
The New York Times
“The St. Lawrence is first and foremost, I think, about risk taking: about playing on the emotional edge; about performing, not to ‘get it right,' but because the music has something to tell us that we cannot live without; something that could make you change your life.”
The Toronto Globe & Mail
“This is what makes the SLSQ one of the great quartets of our time: their incandescent imagination; the graceful lucidity with which they reveal form; their intuitive ability to slip into the skin of their composers; their infectious sense of discovery and creation, even in performance.”
The National Post (Canada)
“Harrowing, provocative and brilliant,...wonderfully spontaneous.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The St. Lawrence String Quartet [play] with imagination, sensitivity, sensational physical abandon, and a complete lack of emotional inhibition.”
The Boston Globe
“Superb…a performance that was emotionally highly charged but never out of control.”
The Washington Post
“Four stars...Transcendent musicians, with nothing stilted about their way of playing or conventional about their stage presence.”
Le Monde (Paris)
“Cream of the current string quartet crop in my listening orbit is the St. Lawrence String Quartet ... [It] plays with extraordinary fluency, but it also explores music with a breadth, depth and freedom that are unusual.”
The Miami Herald
“Whew! What a performance! ...this young Canadian Quartet often delivered truly electrifying moments.”
The Buffalo News
“Dazzling...beyond superlatives…it was like hearing this work [Dvorak's ‘American'] for the first time.”
The Salt Lake Tribune
“Incendiary….The performance of the formidable Beethoven String Quartet in B-Flat Major (Op. 130) was revelatory, as if at every juncture to say, ‘Wow! Isn't this amazing?'”
The Kansas City Star
“The extraordinary energy they bring to everything they play creates a sense of immediacy and excitement that sweeps audiences away.”
Ottawa Citizen
“High-contrast, high-stakes playing…The St. Lawrence Quartet play as if each note is crucial, and as if nothing in their interpretation is so set in stone that it might not change—with tremendous implications—at any moment.”
Globe and Mail (Toronto)