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The Leith Summer Festival welcomes the Penderecki String Quartet for an unprecedented fifth performance at the Historic Leith Church. Always enthusiastically received by a full house of devoted music lovers, the Penderecki returns the favour by providing dazzling performances, among their best. Leith is one of their favourite venues.
The Penderecki Quartet was founded in Poland in 1986 at the urging of the pre-eminent Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. The fruit of their association includes Penderecki's complete works for String quartet on CD (United Records, England). To this day the Quartet is a devoted champion of the music of our time, and has performed a wide range of repertoire from Bach to Brahms, Bart*k to Ligeti, Frank Zappa to John Oswald, and has premiered over 100 new works from numerous composers including Brian Cherney, Linda C. Smith, Randolph Peters, Harry Freedman, Glenn Buhr, Alice Ho, Peter Hatch, Omar Daniel and Gilles Tremblay with assistance from the Canada Council, the Laidlaw Foundation, the CBC, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.
Described by Fanfare Magazine as "an ensemble of formidable power and keen musical sensitivity", the Penderecki Quartet's large discography includes over 25 recordings including the chamber music repertoire of Johannes Brahms on both the Marquis and Eclectra labels, as well as a new release of the six B*la Bart*k quartets under the auspices of Chamber Music in Napa Valley. The Quartet has also recorded discs for CBC, Centaur, EMI and Artifact labels.
The Penderecki String Quartet devotes much of its time to Quartetfest, an intensive Spring-term seminar held at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario where guest faculty have included the Tokyo Quartet, the Ying Quartet, and the Colorado Quartet. The Penderecki Quartet's involvement in education is a year-round commitment as they enter their 16th year as Quartet-in-Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. Under the Quartet's direction, the string program has become one of the top university music programs in Canada, attracting an international body of students.
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