May 19, 2025
Leonard will introduce and speak at the four concerts comprising the 2025 Summer of Angels Chamber Music Festival, running July 10-13 at the Huntington Library, Art Museum & Gardens in San Marino, CA. The festival will feature the New Hollywood String Quartet playing chamber music repertoire recorded by the original Hollywood String Quartet at Capitol Records, with special guests on select pieces: GRAMMY-nominated pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet performs Franck’s Piano Quintet in F Minor with the quartet on July 10; cellist Alban Gerhardt joins the quartet on Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major on July 11; Gerhardt, violist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, and pianist Olga Zado perform on Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat Major on July 12; and Zado re-joins the quartet on July 13 to perform Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F Minor.
The original Hollywood String Quartet, founded by Felix Slatkin and Eleanor Aller in 1939, recorded a series of classical albums for Capitol Records in the 1950s that have since been heralded as some of the finest chamber music recordings of the twentieth century. This led the quartet to recording with Frank Sinatra on his 1956 album with Capitol Records, Close to You, introducing the quartet to a wider audience. Their 1957 Capitol recording of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat won the very first GRAMMY Award for Best Classical Performance, Chamber Music.