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Aylwin String Quartet
Ensemble
The Aylwin String Quartet is a distillation of the "Aylwin Ensemble" which was founded in 1996. These four founder members of the group, Richard Aylwin, Ruth Hudson, Amanda Denley and Graham Bradshaw, who are all either current or past members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, were keen to establish an outlet for their own creative ideas within this more intimate framework. With a desire to complement the mainstream classical quartet repertoire with the more unusual, they have always had a strong interest in contemporary music and still occasionally enlarge the group with guest artists in order to achieve a more flexible programming. Their repertoire ranges from Purcell to Stravinsky and beyond.
In 2000 The Aylwin String Quartet gave a concert supported by the Wurzburger Society, performing his 2nd and 5th Quartets, and in 2004 they appeared at the Bellapais Music Festival in North Cyprus. The Quartet have performed the Bliss Oboe Quintet with Richard Simpson, principal oboe of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and in the summer of 2006 they were invited to play a rarely heard Mozart Piano Concerto with the pianist Huw Watkins, as arranged in quintet form by Mozart himself, at Castle Howard as part of the Ryedale Festival. The Quartet has performed on a yearly basis for the "Music at St James" season in Manchester since 1994 and Richard Aylwin, having directed the inaugural concert of the series in 1988, has been commissioned to compose a work for string quartet, oboe and synthesizer to celebrate their 20th anniversary concert in 2008.
The Quartet members have had an association with the deHavilland Philharmonic orchestra, the UH resident orchestra, for several years, acting as soloists, leader and principals, and have also participated as a quartet in various workshops involving student composers within the Music Centre of the University of Hertfordshire.
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UHR004: Wurzburger String Quartets - Aylwin String Quartet
UHR014: "…and the birds sang too." - Aylwin String Quartet