Kopelman Quartet

When bows hit strings, Bantry House was trans­por­ted to a place where music meets the soul and tran­scends all earthly con­cerns.
Strad Magazine

Foun­ded by exper­i­enced cham­ber musi­cians steeped in the stand­ards and style of the clas­sic Rus­sian school, the Kopel­man Quar­tet car­ries for­ward a rich inher­it­ance of tech­nical excel­lence, lyr­i­cism, grace and musical integrity.

Mikhail Kopel­man, Boris Kuschnir, Igor Sulyga and Mikhail Mil­man all gradu­ated from the Moscow Con­ser­vatoire in the 1970’s, this institution’s golden age, when the stu­dents reg­u­larly worked with musi­cians and teach­ers such as David Ois­trakh, Boris Belenky, Yuri Yankele­vich, Fyodor Druzhinin, Dmitri Shos­takovich, Mstis­lav Rostrop­ovich, Valentin Ber­l­in­sky and Nat­alia Gut­man. These strong musical influ­ences have remained with the mem­bers of the Kopel­man Quar­tet, even though they pur­sued indi­vidual careers for twenty-five years before found­ing the quar­tet in 2002.

Mikhail Kopel­man, first violin, was the renowned leader of the Borodin Quar­tet for twenty years, and was awar­ded the Royal Phil­har­monic Soci­ety Award and the Con­cer­t­ge­bouw Sil­ver Medal of Hon­our. Boris Kuschnir, second violin, prize win­ner of inter­na­tional violin and cham­ber music com­pet­i­tions and also dis­tin­guished teacher whose pupils include Julian Rach­lin and Nikolai Znaider. Igor Sulyga, viola, played for twenty years with Vladi­mir Spivakov, in the Moscow Vir­tu­osi Cham­ber Orches­tra and in his string quar­tet. As found­ing mem­bers of the Moscow String Quar­tet, both Boris Kuschnir and Igor Sulyga worked with Dmitri Shos­takovich on his late quar­tets. Mikhail Mil­man, cello, was for twenty years prin­cipal cel­list of the Moscow Vir­tu­osi and col­lab­or­ated fre­quently with the Borodin Quar­tet in con­certs and recordings.

The com­mon roots and back­ground of the musi­cians enabled the Kopel­man Quar­tet quickly to grow to matur­ity, and their Edin­burgh Fest­ival con­cert, just one year after their found­a­tion, received extraordin­ary reviews, refer­ring to “every hall­mark of dis­tin­guished musi­cian­ship” and “great human­ity in the fin­esse of their playing”.

The Kopel­man Quar­tet has given con­certs in the United King­dom, Spain, Por­tugal, Aus­tria, Italy, the Neth­er­lands, Bel­gium, Ger­many, Den­mark, Sweden, Switzer­land, Slov­akia, Cyprus, the United States, Canada and Rus­sia; fest­ivals in which they have played include the Edin­burgh Inter­na­tional Fest­ival, the Val­lad­olid Fest­ival, the Zurich Fest­ival, the Col­mar Fest­ival, Prague Spring Fest­ival and the Ravinia Fest­ival in the United States. Engage­ments include the
Musik­ver­ein, Vienna, the Dom Muziki, Moscow, the Royal Palace, Mad­rid, the Wig­more Hall, Lon­don, the Con­cer­t­ge­bouw, Ams­ter­dam, and the Pal­ais des Beaux-Arts in Brus­sels, as well as per­form­ances at other ven­ues in Europe, Canada and the United States of Amer­ica. Cham­ber music part­ners have included Elisa­beth Leon­skaja, Mis­cha Maisky and Julian Rachlin.

The Kopel­man Quar­tet is record­ing a Shos­takovich Plus series for Nim­bus Records and has also recor­ded for Wig­more Live, the Wig­more Hall’s own label. Recor­ded rep­er­toire includes music by Shos­takovich, Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Tchaikovsky and Schubert; future releases on Nim­bus Records include the Wein­berg Piano Quintet.

Pho­tos

Images of Kopel­man Quar­tet
Album Cov­ers of the Kopel­man Quartet

Web­site

Offi­cial Web­site of the Kopel­man Quartet