US correspondent Thomas May attends a concert by the Dover Quartet at Benaroya Hall on 25 May 2025

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Dover Quartet: Joel Link, Bryan Lee, Camden Shaw, Julianne Lee; photo: Jorge Gustavo Elias

On a glorious spring Sunday in Seattle, the Dover Quartet drew a full house to the 536-seat Nordstrom Recital Hall for a splendid afternoon concert – no small feat given the lure of sunshine and blue skies on a holiday weekend. Notably, the audience included a sizable contingent of younger listeners – a testament to the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s outreach efforts and to the appeal of this Signature Series concert, which closed the organisation’s inter-season extension between its winter and summer festivals.

The Dovers – Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violins; Julianne Lee, viola; and Camden Shaw, cello – offered a generous programme that moved in reverse chronology, tracing an arc from a contemporary sound world back to the Romantic era. Natural musical storytellers, the ensemble began fittingly like bards on strings with Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, an early work by this American composer that has quickly entered the repertoire. Propelled by dance-infused rhythmic vitality, the Dover’s account mingled bittersweet reflection with a rousingly defiant surge of energy in the final section.

In Janáček’s ’Kreutzer Sonata’ Quartet No. 1, they sustained a remarkable balance between narrative tension and sonic abstraction, with Julianne Lee especially standing out – her expressionist viola lines shifted between the ominous and the mysterious. The Dovers understand how Janáček builds his musical drama through abrupt contrasts of tempo and mood, which they shaped with instinctive unity, culminating in an intensely tragic weight on the final bars.

The Dover Quartet has been in the headlines recently owing to Link’s appointment as concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra starting this autumn; at the same time, the quartet plans to remain together in its current configuration, united by their passion for making music together. That cohesion – and the players’ joyful spontaneity – was obvious throughout the afternoon, but especially in their deeply felt, exuberant reading of Dvořák’s ’American’ Quartet. The Largo was a high point, imbued with warmth and melodic radiance yet free of any hint of sentimentality. Cellist Camden Shaw will provide a masterclass feature on this movement in the July issue of The Strad. Throughout, the ensemble’s rhythmic freedom gave the music space to breathe and bloom.

Shaw spoke fondly of discovering his love of chamber music in this very hall as a young player, under the guidance of the late Toby Saks, cellist and founder of Seattle Chamber Music Society. He also spotlighted his new cello, built in December by Brooklyn-based luthier Samuel Zygmuntowicz – a larger-than-standard instrument with a rich, resonant bass he praised as ideal for quartet playing. Three of the four Dovers now perform on Zygmuntowicz instruments. 

The concert closed with Robert Schumann’s miraculous First String Quartet – another Dover specialty – rendered with marvellous transparency, supple inner lines and convincing proportions. Again, the Adagio arrested time, ardent and deeply felt, never cloying – capping a programme that displayed the Dover Quartet’s signature immediacy of communication.

THOMAS MAY

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