The Silesian String Quartet is one of Eastern Europe's most renowned and durable chamber ensembles, with a strong commitment to contemporary music. Of the 300 works in its repertory, almost two-thirds are by composers of the 20th century or later, and the group has premiered more than 100 works. The Silesian String Quartet, sometimes billed simply as the Silesian Quartet, was formed in Katowice, Poland, in 1978. Its members were recent graduates of the Karol Szymanowski University of Music there. The quartet's current memers are violinists Szymon Krzeszowiec and Arkadiusz Kubica, violist Lukasz Syrnicki, and cellist Piotr Janosik. The quartet took master classes with members of the LaSalle Quartet and the Amadeus, Juilliard, Smetana, and Alban Berg String Quartets. The Silesian String Quartet quickly gained attention; composer Andrzej Krzanowski dedicated his 1978 String Quartet No. 2 to the group, and one of the quartet's earliest recordings was devoted to that work. Prizes at the Contemporary Music Competition in Krakow and at the 1981 Poznan Music Spring festival spread the quartet's name in Poland, and it became known there in the liberalizing atmosphere of the 1980s as a group that championed Polish contemporary music. In 1994, the quartet recorded an album of chamber music by Henryk Górecki on the Olympia label, and it has continued to record a good deal of Polish music for various labels, including CD Accord, EMI, and Chandos. The Silesian String Quartet also plays traditional repertory from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, and the group has toured widely across Europe, the Americas, East Asia, and Israel, appearing at New York's Carnegie Hall, London's Wigmore Hall, and the Salle Pleyel in Paris, among many other prestigious venues. Its collaborators have included clarinetist Martin Fröst, pianist Bruno Canino, and contralto Ewa Podleś. Since the mid-2000s decade, the Silesian String Quartet has been supported by the government of Gliwice, Poland, and has collaborated with the city's Music Theater. As of the early 2020s, the group had given more than 1,000 concerts. The Silesian String Quartet recorded prolifically in the late 2010s and early 2020s, making albums on CD Accord devoted to quartets of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (spelled in the Polish fashion, Wajnberg) and on Chandos, where the group issued the complete string quartets of Grazyna Bacewicz in 2016 as well as those of Krzysztof Penderecki in 2021. ~ James Manheim, Rovi