Efrem Zimbalist Sr. and Fritz Kreisler, friends who shared fame as among the finest violinists of the first half of the 20th century, shared something else — they both dabbled in composing and each wrote a single romantically-infused string quartet. The venerable Fine Arts Quartet, which has espoused these rarely played pieces, has recorded them and performed them widely, brought the pair to the National Gallery of Art on Sunday along with another rarity, the two movements of the youthful Rachmaninoff’s unfinished G Minor Quartet. To say that the Fine Arts has made the Zimbalist and Kreisler works its own would be an understatement. On Sunday night, the quartet inhabited the heart-on-sleeve longing of Kreisler’s overstuffed and sometimes slithery textures with a comfort that was as convincing as its cheerful abandon in the highly stylized dance of the quartet’s last movement.
(Joan Reinthaler Washington Post, February 10, 2014) Full review