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Armadillo String Quartet
The Armadillo String Quartet is one of Los Angeles’s premier chamber music groups, offering concerts in various venues locally and in other parts of the world since its founding in 1980. Advocates for music old and new, the Armadillos have given numerous world premiere performances, including many works written for them, as well as concerts of older works, often in new contexts or settings. The versatile ensemble has played its varied repertoire in many established chamber music series in the Los Angeles area and has been featured at the Ojai Music Festival and other festivals in Southern California. They have produced their own concerts at various locations in the Los Angeles area which have included a 34 1/2 -hour marathon concert of the complete quartets of Joseph Haydn. Since 1991 they have presented annual concerts of the chamber music of Peter Schickele featuring the composer in performance with the quartet and as commentator on his works, which have included many works written for the quartet.
In addition to concerts in traditional auditoriums the group has performed in private homes and in a variety of non-traditional concert sites, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and galleries in the Southwest Museum, the Gene Autry Western Museum and the William S. Hart Museum. The most memorable of these unusual sites, however, have been the natural theaters along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, the Rogue River in Oregon and other rivers in Colorado and Utah during special whitewater rafting trips. The Quartet traveled to Hong Kong in 1997 for a series of concerts and debuted at Carnegie Hall in December 1999, performing the World Premiere of the P. D. Q. Bach String Quartet, “The Moose”, which they subsequently recorded for the Telarc label.
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