Quatour Mosaiques just completed a US Tour.  Here is a review of a recent
performance of Quatour Mosaiques By Pierre Ruhe of the Washington Post --

   The early-music movement is making an impact on string quartet
   performances, but progress has been slow.  This style of playing--a
   combination of lean bow strokes and sparse vibrato, pungent chords
   and tat phrasing--has seeped into chamber and symphony and even opera
   interpretations, but the leading quartet ensembles remain highly
   Romantic in outlook.

   Friday night the Library of Congress presented one of the few quartets
   with an international reputation in the "historically informed" genre,
   the Quatour Mosaiques.  Its cellist and founder, Christophe Coin, is
   French; his colleagues--violinists Erich Hoebarth and Andrea Bischof,
   violist Anita Mitterer--are Austrians.  The group has been around
   since 1985, but where most quartets spend all their playing time
   together, these four also maintain busy solo and orchestral schedules.

   Perhaps that explains the inconsistencies in interpretation and their
   pale exploration of quartets by Mozart (in C, K.  157) and Schubert
   (in A minor, "Rosamunde").  They did reach a polished unanimity in
   Haydn's Quartet in D Minor (the "Fifths"), and if they didn't dig
   very deep into the stormy Menuetto, at least Hoebarth's extended solo
   passages in the Andante movement were lovely, simple and affecting.

this list also discussed the first release of the QM recording of the Haydn
opus 33 quartets as a CD of the Month Discussion..

Mark Seeley <[log in to unmask]>