Saorsa Quartet

Biography

The Saorsa Quartet are a young, Birmingham-based string quartet, formed in 2017 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Performing regularly in Birmingham and across the country, the quartet have played a wide-range of works; from standard quartet repertoire by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Britten, as well as more recent pieces by Mohammed Sidiq and Caroline Shaw.

Throughout their career, the Saorsa Quartet have had the privilege of performing alongside many talented and esteemed musicians, most notably playing Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major (K 515) with Robin Ireland (Lindsay String Quartet) and Lucy Nolan (Eblana String Trio). The quartet have also performed Boccherini’s String Quintet No. 3 in D (Op. 39) alongside former Royal Birmingham Conservatoire student Phoebe Cheng (Double Bass), for a Boccherini Festival (in 2019) with an audience of Boccherini’s descendants.

Most recently, in March 2022, the Saorsa Quartet participated and achieved success in the final of the Sylvia Cleaver Chamber Music Prize at RBC, being awarded the winning prize.

Over their time as a group, the Saorsa Quartet have received coaching from Lucy Nolan, Robin Ireland, Oliver Wille (Kuss Quartet), Oliver Heath (Heath Quartet), Gary Pomeroy (Heath), Jonathan Kelly (Principal Oboist of the Berlin Philharmonic), Peggy Nolan (Eblana String Trio), Jane Salmon (Schubert Ensemble), Sini Simonen (Castalian String Quartet), Charlotte Bonneton (Castalian), and Christopher Graves (Castalian).

The name ‘Saorsa’ means ‘freedom’ in Scottish Gaelic, representing the quartet’s freedom to interpret and explore various compositions with open-mindedness and without limiting themselves to conventional norms.