Chicago Classical Review

The Dover Quartet, which closed the 2026 Winter Chamber Music Festival in rousing fashion Saturday at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, knows a thing or two about conflicting professional loyalties.

A momentous announcement jointly posted by members on the Dover’s website in May 2025 implied that the much-lauded ensemble, founded in 2008 at the Curtis Institute (where it is in residence), was at an existential juncture.

Founding first violinist Joel Link had just been named concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra. Violist Julianne Lee apparently was having her time increasingly taken up by her responsibilities as a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

To complicate matters further, second violinist Bryan Lee was, and is, holding the same chair with the Escher Quartet.

Would Link and Julianne Lee be forced to abandon their chairs at the Dover in light of their heavy outside orchestral commitments? Would the quartet then have to soldier on with different personnel? Would it simply elect to disband?

Members opted for a fourth, and happier, solution.

After reflecting on their future together and what they called “our very special personal and artistic bond,” founding second violinist Bryan Lee, founding cellist Camden Shaw, Link and Lee (who had previously indicated she would resign at the end of the 2024-25 season) announced the quartet would continue in its present configuration—with Curtis-coordinated adjustments in their touring schedule but no changes of personnel.  

Sharing a commitment to “playing chamber music at the highest level,” they wrote, “We can’t imagine not making music together.”

The collective sigh of relief that fanned across the chamber music world seemed  to infuse Saturday’s vigorous and incisive performances with a certain extra degree of reassurance.

Dover Quartet concerts have been among the highlights of the Winter Chamber Fest since 2014, leading to a three-year residency at NU’s Bienen School of Music that concluded in 2018. Their most recent local appearance was in January 2025 when they opened the 28^th edition of the festival.

The Quartet No. 11 in E Major (D.353) is early Schubert, not often played, as cellist Camden Shaw noted in his spoken introduction. Link and friends, in their finely balanced account, struck a happy balance between firm forward impetus and Viennese warmth. The first violinist emerged as the primus inter pares here, his deft bow work setting an example for his responsive colleagues throughout, especially in the Andante’s tender song without words. A sense of playful elegance informed their minuet movement, and high spirits reigned in the Rondo finale.

Even so, the most important discovery of the program was the String Quartet No. 4 of Grażyna Bacewicz.  

The Polish composer’s greatness has until recent times been unfairly overshadowed by the achievements of her compatriots Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki. Though never really forgotten in Poland, it is good to see her impressive body of works, the chamber music in particular, getting the international attention it deserves, nearly 60 years after her passing.

Her Fourth Quartet of 1951 may be the best-known of the seven works the composer-performer wrote in that form. Folkloristic elements and postwar neoclassical gestures are interwoven with a developmental logic that never feels academic. A celebrated violinist, Bacewicz wrote expertly for string instruments in a freely tonal yet accessible idiom that at times makes one think of Debussy as filtered through the mystical haze of Karol Szymanowski. All this and more marks her as one of the foremost women composers of all time, as Lutoslawski praised her.

The Dover foursome dispatched the Fourth Quartet with enormous panache, making Bacewicz’s original and compelling sound world the stuff of high musical adventure.

The sometimes gnarly interweavings of musical material in the opening movement emerged in clear relief, a clear through-line always in view. Slashing unison bow strokes brought an intensity of rhythmic response, never at the expense of precision.

By the same token, the finely calibrated attacks and releases of the Andante second movement demonstrated how closely these players listen and respond to each other. (No wonder they have refused to part company.) The concluding Allegro giocoso found the Dover virtuosos relishing the rapidly shifting textures and colors with a vitality that proved irresistible.  

Felix Mendelssohn’s Quartet in F minor, Op. 80, is another piece we don’t get to hear nearly often enough in concert. Completed not long before his death at 38, this touching subliminal lament for his sister Fanny represents his last major work.

The Dover was in full command of the music’s darkly tempestuous moods. The players brought out the goblin-dance feel of the material surrounding the second-movement trio. That said, they made the Adagio the beating heart of their musical conversation. Soft tonal shadings were applied with the utmost sensitivity. The finale, peppered with the kind of passing dissonances one hardly associates with the composer, closed things off with an edge-of-seat flourish.

A beautiful way to conclude the chamber festival. Welcome back—in several senses—Dover Quartet.

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