“Newport Classical Summer Festival held its Festival Finale Sunday in the Breakers Mansion, closing the series with fiery notes of bravura from the Harlem Quartet alongside the Resident Festival Artists. The foursome of Ilmar Gavilán and Amy Shroeder violins, Jaime Amador viola and Felix Umansky cello, debuted at NMF in 2021, also at the Breakers Mansion, but outside in a tent on the lawn due to Covid. First violinist Ilmar also appeared with his composer-pianist brother Aldo-López Gavilán in 2022, celebrating their reunion after years of separation due to the political situation between Havanna and the West. Last evening’s event featured unknown and rarely heard gems by Fanny Mendelssohn, Dimitri Shostakovich, and the Gavilán patriarch, famed composer and symphony conductor Guido López Gavilán del Rosario, b. 1944 in the Cuban province of Matanzas, the concert closing with the epic Octet in E-flat Major Op 20 by Felix Mendelssohn…”
-Stephen Martorella, The Boston Musical Intelligencer
