Summer Festival — New Hollywood String Quartet

SUMMER 2025: July 10th - July13th, 2025

Tickets go on sale May 12th, 2025

Summer of Angels Chamber Music Festival

Inspired by the Hollywood String Quartet, we will be honoring their legacy by performing works from their legendary Capitol Records discography. Leonard Slatkin will introduce and speak at each of these four concerts in a tribute to his parents Felix Slatkin and Eleanor Aller, the first violinist and cellist of that famed String Quartet.

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Tickets On Sale May 12th 2025

You are cordially invited to come join us for the upcoming Summer of Angels Chamber Music Festival at the beautiful Rothenberg Hall at the Huntington Gardens. Inspired by the Hollywood String Quartet we will be honoring their legacy by performing works from their legendary Capitol Records discography. Leonard Slatkin will intoduce and speak at each of these four concerts in a tribute to his parents Felix Slatkin and Eleanor Aller, the first violinist and cellist of that famed quartet. Joining the New Hollywood String Quartet- violinists Tereza Stanislav and Rafael Rishik, violist Robert Brophy and cellist Andrew Shulman are some of the most accomplished chamber musicians from around the world. We are thrilled that pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, cellist Alban Gerhardt, violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama and pianist Olga Zado will be joining us.

The Summer of Angels Festival brings together the Quartet’s esteemed friends and colleagues from around the world to perform the music that inspired them all as young musicians.

The Summer of Angels is the sixth chamber music festival since the New Hollywood String Quartet’s 2019 Summer of Brahms Festival, which featured performances of all 25 instrumental chamber works of Brahms in a series of eight consecutive sold out concerts. The LA Times praised the “enthusiastic robustness” and “sheer liquidity,” of the performances. In December of 2021, the NHSQ presented the Vienna Holiday Concerts which celebrated the chamber music of Schubert and Mozart. Classical Voice noted, “At the Huntington, the NHSQ exuded a refined and luminous presence in keeping with its growing reputation, 20 years into its history.” The 2022 Summer of Beethoven Festival presented some of the best of Beethoven’s vast chamber music output, showcasing repertoire from each of his compositional periods, to convey the arc of his evolution as a composer. The 2023 Summer of Paris featured the impressionist music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Their stunning legacy transformed musical expression at the early part of the 20th century and continues to shape our musical landscape to this very day. The 2024 Summer of Bohemia featured the extraordinary music of Antonin Dvořák, Leos Janàček, Ernst von Dohnányi, Josef Suk, Bedřich Smetana and Bohuslav Martinů. Not unlike Johannes Brahms, these composers used their cultural heritage to guide and infuse their compositions with the unique melodies and harmonies of their countrymen.

In a 2024 review of the summer festival, Mark Swed wrote: “The New Hollywood String Quartet takes its inspiration from the famed Hollywood String Quartet, composed of studio musicians in the 1940s and ’50s. It had the reputation as America’s finest string quartet for its superbly silky sound and capacity for vivid drama. Its unerringly sublime Schubert and penetrating late-Beethoven recordings remind us that the golden era of soundtracks is owed in large part to such studio musicians.”

“That’s still true with the New Hollywood, formed in 2001, four decades after the original Hollywood Quartet disbanded.”

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