Easter treat for classical music lovers
Music lovers who were unlucky enough to have missed the feast of chamber music on offer in Cork over the Easter weekend would be well advised to keep an eye on the broadcasting schedule of Lyric FM. The six concerts that took place in the principal venue, Curtis Auditorium, Cork School of Music, were recorded for future broadcast and all of them are something to which I look forward...Haydn's Seven Last Words of Our Saviour received a most tender, polished performance from the Callino Quartet. Other highlights included the T'ang Quartet's performance ( without music) of Mugam Sajahi by the Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, and the Callino Quartet playing Schumann.. The Callino Quartet's performance of Haydn ( Op. 76 no.2) was as good as it gets; joyous, true to the score, wonderfully expressive and fabulously exciting...The Callino Quartet together with Finghin Collins created an elegaic magic with Schnittke's piano quintet that almost moved me to tears...
Declan Townsend, The Irish Examiner, 27th March 2008

Callino Quartet, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
The Callino Quartet juxtaposed classic and contemporary string quartets in a packed three-work programme for their free one-hour Sundays at Noon concert in the Hugh Lane Gallery. They opened with Beethoven's Opus 74 ("Harp"), capturing well the gentler, more relaxed mood with which the composer invested it after the rigorous, leading-edge quality of the three "Razumovsky" quartets published two years earlier. In particular, the Callino produced an almost voluptuous smoothness in the lyrical slow movement, though always nicely judged and without overstatement. Tipperary-born Frank Corcoran was in attendance for the long-overdue Irish premiere of his String Quartet No 3 from 1997. He subtitles it Quasi un quartetto and includes it in a series of works each bearing the Latin prefix quasi, meaning "almost". By what measure the work can only qualify as "almost" a quartet is not immediately clear. It's written in one continuous 15-minute movement which Corcoran describes as a "musical stream of consciousness . . . discharging all the elements of fast, slow, violent, lyrical, dense, thin, total stringiness of filigrane" - which was how the Callino played it, like it says on the tin. Something the performance lacked, however, was the kind of powerful inner intensity which characterised the playing in the concert's final piece, the 1989 Officium breve, by Gy�rgy Kurt�g (his third quartet). Unlike the relentlessness and seeming chaos of the Corcoran, Kurt�g's similarly short piece is intricately crafted into miniature movements - 15 of them, some sublimely beautiful - which run a gamut of emotions in response to the death of his friend and fellow composer, Endre Szerv�nsky. It is, in fact, an instrumental requiem. Whatever explains the Callino's pronounced leap in intensity between the Corcoran and the Kurt�g - whether the score itself or perhaps the ensemble's disposition towards it - this was by some way the best performance of the concert.
Michael Dungan, The Irish Times, 15th January 2008

An Ensemble to be taken Seriously
A young string quartet which includes Schumann's Third Quartet in its repertoire is an ensemble to be taken seriously. If it employs this work as a visiting card it is to be taken seriously. Presented under the auspices of the reactivated Tunnell Trust, this was a marvellous performance, in every way what this poetic, romantic, haunting and still under-appreciated masterpiece deserves. To say that it needs four women to play it, which is what it had on this occasion, is not strictly true, yet the evidence in terms of interplay, feeling, lyricism, perception and touch spoke for itself. Placing it after the abrasive terseness of Bartok's Third Quartet and the melancholy sweetness of Mozart's D minor was an act of faith wholly justified and, in the event, consistently enthralling. Not that the other performances were in any way sub-standard or unfocused. Without diminishing the acerbic side of the Bartok, the players captured its warmth and ensured that important inner voices were always as audible as those of the first violin and cello in their more obviously assertive roles. In the Mozart, too, there was keen responsiveness to detail, even if there was a tendency here to fuss with things which could to their advantage have been left alone. By permitting nothing to sound like an accompaniment, the players sometimes impeded the flow of the message they were delivering. But it is good news that they will be back soon, sharing Mendelssohn's Octet with that other admirable young quartet, the Belcea.
Conrad Wilson, Glasgow Herald, 4 November 2004