Castalian String Quartet

Sini Simonen (violin) / Daniel Roberts (violin) / Natalie Loughran (viola) / Steffan Morris (cello)

The Castalian String Quartet is taking the international chamber music scene by storm.

Gaining renown for interpretations “full of poetry, joy and sorrow, realised to such perfection” (The Observer), they have recently been announced as the first Hans Keller String Quartet in Residence at the University of Oxford.

Formed in 2011, the quartet studied with Oliver Wille at the Hochschule für Musik, Hannover, before being selected by the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) in 2016. They were awarded First Prize at the 2015 Lyon International Chamber Music Competition and in 2018 were recipients of the inaugural Merito String Quartet Award and Valentin Erben Prize, and a prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. The ensemble was named Young Artist of the Year at the 2019 Royal Philharmonic Society Awards.

Recent debuts include New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Konzerthaus, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Paris Philharmonie and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The Castalian String Quartet performs frequently at the Wigmore Hall in its home city of London. In 2018 they recorded Haydn’s Op.76 quartets for the Wigmore Live label and were joined by pianists Stephen Hough and Cédric Tiberghien, violist Isabel Charisius and clarinetist Michaels Collins for a Brahms and Schumann series in the 2019-20 season. Their next Wigmore Hall cycle will feature all three quartets by Benjamin Britten. The quartet often appears at festivals such as Spoleto USA, Aldeburgh, North Norfolk, Cheltenham, East Neuk, Lockenhaus and Heidelberger Frühling. Recent and upcoming premieres include works by Charlotte Bray, Edmund Finnis, Mark Simpson, Simon Rowland-Jones and Sir Mark-Anthony Turnage.

The Castalian String Quartet’s 2022 release Between Two Words (Delphian Records), presenting music by Orlando di Lasso, Thomas Adès, Ludwig van Beethoven and John Dowland, was given a double five-star review as BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Album of the Month’: “this outstanding disc offers listeners a true philosophical journey…a series of intricately connected works, each performed with rare beauty and originality by a quartet at the height of its powers…[the Heiliger Dankgesang from Beethoven Op.132] is nothing short of a revelation in its lucidity of line and sheer beauty of sound.”

The quartet’s name is derived from the Castalian Spring in the ancient city of Delphi. According to Greek mythology, the nymph Castalia transformed herself into a fountain to evade Apollo’s pursuit, thus creating a source of poetic inspiration for all who drink from her waters. Committed to inspiring a diverse audience for classical music, the Castalians have performed everywhere from the great concert halls to maximum security prisons and even the Colombian rainforest.

Founded in 2014, the St Anne’s Camerata is a side-by-side initiative comprised of professional musicians, student scholars, and auditioned exhibitioners from Oxfordshire schools.  For the last three years the Camerata has worked with the Castalian String Quartet as part of their Oxford residency. Central to the focus on music outreach at St Anne’s College, the Camerata regularly present performance and composition activities in collaboration with local partners – recent examples include collaborations with BIM, OCMS, Oxfordshire Concerto Competition, Atlantic Coast Conducting Accademy, Ensemble ISIS, M@SH Marathons, and the Oxford Conducting Institute, with performances at the Holywell Music Room, JdP, Sheldonian Theatre, Radcliffe Observatory, Weston Library, Freemasons Hall (London), and Symphony Hall (Birmingham). They have delivered residencies at the Sao Bento Monastery in Brasilia (2014), the University of Nairobi, Kenya (2018), and the Portel Festival of Music, Portugal (2022), and more recently have enjoyed performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Sheldonian Theatre (2023). 

Leandro Landolina is a composer, sound design artist and flautist in their second year of undergraduate study reading Music at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Much of their music is focussed on configuring and reconfiguring timbres over long periods of time. The slow rates of change of various parameters are often foregrounded in their music, with the aim of inviting a multitude of experiential hearings. Leandro often works collaboratively; across numerous media, techniques, people, binaries, concepts and objects. Their proficiencies in both sound synthesis and acoustic instrumental composition are ever intermingling and co-informing, resulting in a highly individuated style. 

Nick Samuel is a composer and conductor from Kent, currently in his second year reading music at St Anne’s college. His musical life began with a variety of instrumental lessons, including piano, trumpet, cello and voice, before Nick found a passion for composition when he was 12. He draws on composers such as Khachaturian and Ginastera for their fine balance between tonalism and modernism for his own works, and is always enthusiastic about researching and discovering composers new to him whose work piques his interest; most recently Nick has been investigating guitar music by Ginastera and Takemitsu to learn better how to compose for the instrument. Nick has recently finished composing his piano cycle 24 Preludes and 1 Fugue (2020-2025) and The Four Neomartyrs of Rethymnon (2024) for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Future projects include a violin concerto, a string quartet (with two actors), a Shakespeare song cycle. Nick is extremely proud to be the director and organiser of BRICKWORKS, a group of second year composers who give termly concerts of their new music, and has recently been appointed principal conductor of the Oxford University Wind Orchestra (OUWO). When not composing or conducting, he is also keen pianist-accompanist and playwright.