Alberni Quartet
The Alberni Quartet is a string quartet, whose members have included:
- Dennis Simons, first violin
- Howard Davis, second violin, first violin from 1968 (died 5 February 2008)
- Karin Leishman, first violin
- John Knight, Peter Pople, second violin
- John White, then Berian Evans, then Roger Best, then Matthew Souter viola
- Gregory Baron, then David Smith, cello
They are based in Harlow, Essex where they became established in the 1960s as the town's "quartet in residence", and by the mid-1970s had become world-renowned. Their debut in the Carnegie Hall was well received in the New York Times, and they received positive reviews of their recordings of Schumann's piano quintet, Schubert's string quintet and Brahms' string sextets.
As well as performing a wide range of the classical string quartet repertoire from Haydn and Mozart to Bartók and Benjamin Britten, they performed new works written for them including Alan Rawsthorne's third string quartet written for the 1965 Harlow Music Festival, and Nicholas Maw's first string quartet.
Benjamin Britten coached them in his own first and second string quartets (they have recorded all three of his works in the genre), and entrusted the first British performances of Dmitri Shostakovich's ninth and tenth quartets (whose scores he had acquired from the composer) to them.
They are still performing and teaching worldwide (2011).