Heath Quartet

Winning top honors and support in its early years, the Heath Quartet excels in performances and recordings of 20th century and contemporary music. The group members teach individually and together at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. The Heath Quartet was formed at Britain's Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester in 2002. The members were Oliver Heath and Sara Wolstenholme (violin), Gary Pomeroy (viola), and Christopher Murray (cello), and that membership remained stable until 2021 when Heath departed from his namesake group and was replaced by Marije Johnston, who became second violinist. The Heath Quartet earned major recognition as its talents developed; it won a Borletti-Buitoni Special Ensemble Scholarship and was represented by the Young Classical Artists Trust charity. The group was also chosen as part of Wigmore Hall's Emerging Artists program and performed a program of Michael Tippett quartets there in 2011; that performance was recorded and issued on the Wigmore Hall Live label, winning critical acclaim. The following year, the Heath Quartet won the Ensemble Prize at the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern festival, where it has continued to appear frequently. The year 2013 brought another major honor: the quartet became the first ensemble in 15 years to win the Royal Philharmonic Society's Young Artists Award. Those honors helped propel the Heath Quartet to a busy schedule of appearances, not only at Wigmore Hall and other top British venues but also in such internationally prominent chamber music halls as the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, where they held a residency, and the Palau de la Musica Catalana in Barcelona. In 2018, the group toured New Zealand. Its recording career has steadily developed, with complete cycles of Bartók's and Tchaikovsky's string quartets, released on the Harmonia Mundi label, earning positive notice. Strongly committed to contemporary music, the Heath Quartet has performed music by Hans Abrahamsen, Louis Andriessen, Sofia Gubaidulina, and other renowned figures, often working directly with the composers. In 2017, the quartet released an album of chamber music by Kevin Raftery on the Metier label. In 2021, the Heath Quartet moved to Signum Classics for a recording of string quartets by Berg, Webern (the Langsamer Satz), and Schoenberg (the String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10), with soprano Carolyn Sampson on the soprano part of the latter work.
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