Donald E. Osborne,  Director California Artists Management 564 Market Street, Suite 420, San Francisco, CA  94104-5412 415 362-2787 / fax: 415 362-2838 / Skype: calartistsdon  / Email

Susan Endrizzi Morris,  Director California Artists Management P.O. Box  2479, Mendocino, CA  95460-2479 707-937-4787 / cell: 415-302-1083 / Skype: sueendrizzi / Email

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Kopelman Quartet   Mikhail Kopelman, violin       Boris Kuschnir, violin Igor Sulyga, viola       Mikhail Milman, cello   (updated October 2010 – please discard any previous version)

“This was an enormously distinguished concert. The Kopelman Quartet made the strongest possible case for it, bringing an aristocratic poise and understated elegance. The players’ refined blend and care for quality of sound evoked in microcosm something of that same finesse which made the strings of the Leningrad Philharmonic so remarkable in their heyday, whilst the Kopelman’s ability to characterise moments such as the shadowy fugato at the slow movement’s heart made light of what might have been the work’s ‘longer.’ Especially memorable were the airy scherzo, the trio distinctive for its use of cello harmonics, and the chattering finale, both perfectly paced. By way of an appetiser, the first half closed with Shostakovich’s Elegy and Polka. Mikhail Kopelman’s hypnotic and deeply felt account of Elegy is one of those moments – almost a personal eulogy – which will linger long in the mind, whilst the group despatched Polka with a deadpan humour and perfect timing. Seldom either has one heard pizzicatos of such resonant fullness that they almost seemed to fill the hall. With these artists the account of the Piano Quintet was almost ‘hors de concours.’ One can hardly imagine a more complete exploration. Would that this concert have been recorded.”

                                                            Classicalsource.com - November 21, 2009

“Here’s another fine link with the great Russian tradition. Mikhail Kopelman, first violinist of the Borodin Quartet for 20 years, is the most familiar name here, but all four players went on to distinguished careers after graduating from the Moscow Conservatoire in the musically heady 1970s prior to forming the Kopelman Quartet in 2002. Beauty and warmth of string tone seem to be paramount, and that helps us to buy into the old-fashioned yet utterly sincere Romanticism of Myaskovsky’s last quartet. Shostakovich, with whom former Moscow Quartet members Boris Kuschnir and Igor Sulyga worked towards the end of the composer’s life, is a different matter, and these two most famous of his quartets stand at opposite extremes. Here, as elsewhere, the Kopelmans’ dynamics rarely fall lower than what allows the players to express a full-bodied tone. The Allegro molto has appropriate bite. This team’s burnished musicianship is honourably served by the spacious but ever-present Monmouth recording.”

                                                            BBC Music Magazine – April 16, 2009

“So here we have three Soviet Quartets, each exploring different lands, each giving much satisfaction in the journey we take with them, and each receiving performances of superlative stature. No ensemble will ever match the great recording of the 8th Quartet with the Borodin Quartet, but the Kopelman comes very close. Their intensity, poetry, insight and magnificent musicianship is obvious in every bar of these works. Their work is not to be missed and neither is this excellent disk.”                         Musicwebinternational.com - September 2008

“The musicians cohere unforgettably, to the manner born, allying impressive technique to a solid mutual sympathy and understanding for music from the land of their birth. The keynote of the Kopelman Quartet’s performance was a melting sweetness, assured in its professionalism, confidently affectionate and fluently sincere, with just an occasional hint of breathless wonder and delight, expressed through slight, almost unnoticeable rubato. This was a tour de force, enchanting and fresh.  Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet received a rich, very human performance – dark and agonised, brittle and resigned, deeply aware of the distress that lies at the core of the human condition. This was a very Russian performance of Shostakovich’s best-known, most-often-played quartet. Igor Sulyga made the most of the prominent viola part. Here, Shostakovich’s disturbance and insight were universal.  Souvenir de Florence glowed. From the mid-movement fugue, the finale developed into a hectic, intoxicating riot.  This distinguished concert gave us, one might say, a panorama of the Russian soul."

                                                            Classicalsource.com - May 19, 2007

Headline: “Quartet imbues music with unique Russian flair”

“Russian music and Russian musicians. No better coupling exists. None is so complementary, so sublime, so perfect. Nothing is quite as special as Russian musicians playing the music of their homeland when they manage to channel all the emotion, joy, and torture of every single soul in Russia. In Mandel Hall last Friday, we were treated to something this special. The night was hot and humid. The chairs in the hall seemed more uncomfortable than usual. The décor appeared worse somehow. The acoustics couldn1t be worse. Everything felt especially weighty and dampening. Then the Kopelman Quartet walked on stage. Rather than changing the mood, rather than lifting the burden off the shoulders of the audience, they embraced it. Opening with Prokofiev1s second quartet, Op. 92, they played with a quality that bestowed a yearning life upon it. The Kopelman let the weight of the night sink in with an unusually long pause before the development. All in all, this movement promised a thoroughly wonderful night.  That promise was fulfilled (and more) with the second movement. This Adagio transported everyone from the earth to the stratosphere. Beginning with a cello solo in its highest register and ending with rising, heavenly chords, this movement contains practically no low sonorities. The string players exploited this fact exquisitely, adding to the sublimity with their whispering, enticing tones. All of the eternally moving accompaniment figures sounded not as if they were labored intensities, but rather delicate flutterings. The ricochets were played with delightful accuracy, and the pizzicati all had an extra pop to them. They played the Prokofiev masterfully, as they played the Miaskovsky that followed. The second half of the program consisted solely of Tchaikovsky’s Op. 30 quartet. The Kopelman Quartet added yet another dimension to the weight of the night. Somehow they managed to further thicken the texture of their ensemble from its already viscous unity. This was Russian music in the hands of Russians, the musical expression of the tortured soul, and the Kopelman Quartet emptied their hearts into the performance. The weight of humidity was channeled into the weight of the music in a most extraordinary way. Russian music and Russian musicians. This concert made me certain that no better coupling exists.”                                                                              Chicago Maroon - November 9, 2004

“This partnership seems to have netted a group that sings as one voice, with Kopelman as a stunning lead singer. That the Kopelman Quartet can have it all - clarity of line and texture, plus richness of sound and a vast color palette - is not in doubt. It was all there in the Prokofiev. The performance was perfectly calibrated: It gave the work's playfulness, the uneven dance phrases, their full measure, without ever slighting the biting edge of Prokofiev's pungent dissonances. The group's sense of color was similarly on target, with delicacy giving way to gruffness, and plenty of room for a tearful vocal lament by the viola and a light, sweet walking song by the first violin. The finale's wild excitement came without sacrifice of direction or diction. The playing - and the music - were similarly inspired in Shostakovich's Op. 49.”                 
                                                            Ann Arbor News - November 7, 2004

“I wouldn't argue with a fellow member of the audience who thought this the greatest concert he'd ever heard at the Arts Centre...total mastery not just of technical challenges but of musical artistry - of balancing parts, of dialogue between players and above all else of tonal richness... the Kopelman Quartet produced an extraordinary refinement of sound allied to an intelligence that gave each note full weight and meaning. It was a privilege to hear artists of this sensitivity.
”                                                                   The Jersey Evening Post - June 10, 2004

“The  Morrison Artists Series has a habit of bringing in the very best, and they certainly did so last Sunday. If Sunday's concert was a fair representation of the group, they ought to be one of the top quartets in the world. If you wanted to put together a grand Russian quartet, you could hardly have better raw materials. Kopelman himself is something of a legend among chamber music lovers . That amazing, rich, honey-sweet, dense violin sound is there as ever. It's a sound unlike any one else's. Kuschnir is about the best imaginable second — just as powerful as Kopelman and with a similar sound-ideal, just a little brighter and tauter. The lower strings are of a different but equally Russian type, lithe and sinewy and intense. At its best it was heaven. When the Kopelmans were good they were breathtakingly good. The quiet places were unbelievably well controlled, while the fiercer bits got a ‘take-no-prisoners’ treatment that I don't think many quartets would dare. In between was a sort of rich lyricism that I've not encountered often anywhere. The trio of ‘Death and the Maiden’s’ scherzo was pure bliss. The Shostakovich was certainly a fine test-piece for the Kopelmans; we now know that they can do jocular and tragic and brutal and flippant, and much else besides. The slow movement — a passacaglia in whose opening bars Kopelman's plaintive soliloquy sounded touchingly vulnerable opposite the implacable lower three strings — might have been the best of the performance, but that the kaleidoscopic finale that followed it was also phenomenal. The closing bars, with Kopelman once again declaiming quietly over an incredibly calm and perfectly-balanced string-trio backdrop, were such as to stop the breath. The encore was also Shostakovich: the first movement of his First Quartet, played deftly and, at its end, with such blissful repose."     
                                                            San Francisco Classical Voice – October 12, 2003

“With Beethoven’s complete quartets in progress elsewhere in town, this programme of Tchaikovsky and Schubert seemed nothing if not interventionist. But what an intervention! The concert may have been a one-off, the Kopelmans may be new to Britain, but on the strength of what they did on Saturday morning these Russians deserve to be given a series to themselves next year. If that happens, let them choose Tchaikovsky. Presenting his Third Quartet as a visiting card could have been disastrous in hands other than theirs, for the work is long, difficult to perform, written in a notoriously awkward six-flatted key (E flat minor), and widely dismissed as a symphony in disguise. But if anyone can reveal it as a masterpiece, it is a Russian ensemble such as this, who know how to play it and clearly adore its every note. With true but never overstated appreciation of its sense of mortality – written in memory of a friend, it was later performed at the composer’s own funeral – they conveyed to a nicety the muted undertones of the valedictory slow movement, the sad poise of pizzicato accompaniments, the emotional rises and falls in no way undermined by the fact that they were voiced by four players rather than 90. Here was music-making of total integrity, with each player listening intently, and visibly, to his companions. The same virtues pervaded Schubert’s C minor Quarttetsatz and the Death and the Maiden quartet in performances which once again were all the better for their rigour, beauty of inner detail, and desire to let the music speak eloquently for itself.”

                                                            The Herald (Scotland) - August 25, 2003

“It is almost impossible to believe that the Kopelman Quartet has only been in existence for one year. Every hallmark of distinguished musicianship was integral to their Queen’s Hall performance on Saturday morning. But these four sober-faced graduates of the Moscow Conservatory are carrying the torch of a hallowed tradition that has included 20 years as leader of the Borodin Quartet for first violin Mikhail Kopelman. In Schubert’s unfinished Quartettsatz, as with the same composer’s Death and the Maiden quartet, the Kopelman’s lustrous sound was strong and decisive, swooping from tender lyricism to bursts of fiery passion. Technically brilliant, there is great humanity in the finesse of their playing. Even Death and the Maiden, a staple of the repertoire, bristled with constant renewal, with the final tarantella bringing it to a thrilling conclusion. Tchaikovsky’s E flat minor Op 30 is on the lengthy side, but the Kopelman [Quartet] shifted imperceptibly through its expressive moods – lithesome and agile one moment, frenzied or somber the next.”                The Scotsman - August 25, 2003

“How wonderful to see Nimbus demonstrating all its strengths in this superb issue. 

 The programme is exquisitely chosen, not only to play to the quartet’s strengths, but also because of the juxtaposition of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. The importance of Shostakovich’s cycle is without question, but Prokofiev’s two little gems are largely ignored - something I have never understood. Marvellous that we can encounter them in a performance such as this. 

The Third Quartet of Shostakovich was one of various works that went underground only to resurface in the 1960s. Related to the ‘War’ works - it is a major statement. Kopelman in particular excels in his characterisation. The rugged determination of the second movement and the peasant-like dance of the third contain some of the most uninhibited quartet playing I have heard in a long while, on or off record. This is a masterly performance. There have been so many Shostakovich quartet recordings in recent years, but few, if any, have matched this. 

 

So to the Prokofiev. It would be a real victory for the recording industry if this disc could spawn concert performances of the quartet and in doing so give it a real chance with the public. 

The Kopelman Quartet clearly takes the work very seriously. The first movement is gritty, helped by the close, but not stiflingly close, recording. That recording really comes into its own in the Adagio, where the violin pizzicati are stunningly caught. This whole movement is mesmeric, the octave statements unnervingly ghostly. 

It is in the finale, though, where one has to gasp at the fertility of Prokofiev’s invention. In the Kopelman Quartet’s hands, this is like hearing the piece with new ears. Surely, this disc will win the piece many friends. 

A tremendous success. More, please.”

                                                            MusicwebInternational