This thrilling performance stirred the audience at Bollington Arts Centre with a brilliant cascade of sound during the fourth concert of the current season. What magnificent players they are; their pace, now urgent and very fast-moving, now resolving into a calm ,weightless resonance, fastened onto the listener until the very last chords of the final work.
The piece which really astonished the audience was Ligeti’s first quartet. This single movement in seventeen ultra-short sections seized eveyone with a grip that was like a rivet. It was a kaleidoscope of changing pace, changing harmony, changing moods and changing style.The musicianship and technique of all the players caused much wonder , it was so alive. The piece hald everyone in its grasp.
Their account of the Smetana (no1) and Dvorak (op 106) showed also the vitality of their style responding to every demand. They were at home with this Bohemian music and it was a delight to hear both works, the slow movements of which were very finely drawn. In all this they never lost authoritative control. The colour and pulse was always there in this Slavonic music and nor did they lose its expressive beauty in passages of deepest feeling.
This quartet will without doubt go far. Though formed ten years ago they are continuing to study under the most distinguished instrumentalists whose experience can only bring out the full gifts that can be discerned in each player now. A performance like this quickens the response of listeners to music and is a joy to receive.
Joan Houlihan (review of Bollington Arts Centre Concert, March 2012)
KING’S PLACE TRIUMPH
Those who managed to catch the last of the 2011 season of Chamber Studio Showcase concerts in King’s Place, London, would have considered themselves very fortunate indeed. The artists at the end of a memorable evening, which had included a masterly performance of the Ravel Piano Trio, were the Wu Quartet.
This new and highly talented group of artists played Dvorak’s last Quartet Opus 106. From the opening bars of the first movement’s Allegro, they made it clear that they were on powerful musical journey. The performance had great warmth as well as passion; the third movement’s Vivace was played with delicacy and a sense of fun and when the final chords of the last movement were played, the audience rose to its feet in a roar of appreciation.
The Wu Quartet will be performing the Dvorak Quartet Op 106 in the final concert of the Woodbridge Chamber Concert 2012 series on Saturday 2nd June together with Schumann’s Piano Quintet Op 44.
For more information please visit www.woodbridgechamberconcerts.org
(JOHN TREADWAY, Woodbridge Chamber Concerts, MAY 2011)
Sensational young quartet to play at Cratfield in 2012
Anyone present in the Britten Studio at Snape on the Saturday afternoon of Humphrey Burton’s Simply Schubert80th birthday weekend will have heard a heart-stoppingly fresh, intense and technically secure performance of the Schubert String Quintet in C, D956. It was by the Wu Quartet, founded at Chetham’s School of Music in 2002, with their new cellist Joe Zeitlin, plus Richard Harwood as the second cello.
We have now booked them to play a concert at Cratfield in our 2012 season (2011 is already fully planned). But we believe the wait to be well worth it and that their name and reputation will be much more widely known by the time they come back to Suffolk.
(PHILIP BRITTON, Concerts at Cratfield, March 2011)
The bill of fare at a Park Lane Group Young Artists concert often suggests a jumble sale, with wildly divergent goods jostling. But Tuesday’s jumble of performers, testing their mettle on the new, or at least the late 20th century, proved relatively sober. The main concert swung between a string quartet and a tenor with piano accompaniment: easy enough to take, especially when the Wu String Quartet, former schoolmates from Chetham’s School of Music, fiddled through three British works with a high degree of passion and promise. These were the night’s stars.
Each work was chosen well; each fell gratefully on the ear, eased by the players’ exuberant panache, shaded colours, and controlled ensemble…… Morgan Hayes’s punchy little Dances on a Ground or Nicholas Maw’s Third Quartet of 1994, alternately mellifluous and abrupt, and wonderful in both registers.
TIMES (GEOFF BROWN, JAN 2010)
The Eighth Naxos Quartet, in one movement, is a study in restrained beauty; starting with icy, somehow dispassionate, music, the material is developed and at the end, like Turandot, the heart of the work has melted and grown up. Ending with the most exquisite muted sounds this work is a real winner and can easily stand comparison with any string quartet written since the end of World War Two. The Wu Quartet played with grace and style in a breathtaking performance.
CLASSICALSOURCE.COM (OCT 2009)
It was with the Third Quartet (1994) by Nicholas Maw, however, that the Wu members really came into their own……(the Wu Quartet) certainly had the measure of the work and could do worse than to champion its cause.
CLASSICALSOURCE.COM (JAN 2010)
The Wu String Quartet caught the capering, anarchic energy of Morgan Hayes’s Dances on a Ground very well
DAILY TELEGRAPH (JAN 2010)