Search - Cassatt String Quartet :: Music By Davidson, Woolfe, Woggoner & Hovda

Sadly, the cellist featured in this recording, Anna Cholakian, passed away several years ago. She was the ensemble's driving force and creative fire behind its imaginative, poetic renderings of new music. On this disc, the repertoire and the musicians push us beyond known boundaries. Julia Wolfe's Four Marys is a wrenching work, on which the Cassatt bestows the sort of brilliant, gripping interpretive effort I wish the Kronos Quartet would put out. Daniel S. Godfrey's Intermedio comes across as somewhat derivative and is the weakest piece on the album. But the performance shows off what there is to like. --Gwendolyn Freed