String quartet Violini, Violetta [viola], e Violoncello senza Cembalo" (Sonata for four instruments: two violins, viola, and cello without harpsichord), this was a natural evolution from the existing tradition. The string quartet in its now accepted form came about with Haydn. If the combination of two violins, viola and cello was not unknown before Haydn, when it occurred in chamber music it was more likely through circumstance than conscious design; certainly the string quartet enjoyed no recognized status as an ensemble in the way that two violins with basso continuo – the so-called 'trio sonata' – had for more than a hundred
String Quartet No. 15 (Villa-Lobos) String Quartet No. 15 (Villa-Lobos) String Quartet No. 15 is one of a series of seventeen works in the medium by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and was written in 1954. A performance lasts approximately nineteen minutes. Villa-Lobos composed his Fifteenth Quartet in 1954, working on it at the Tamanaco Hotel in Caracas, Venezuela and completing the score in New York. It was first performed by the Juilliard String Quartet (Robert Mann and Isidore Cohen, violins; Raphael Hillyer, viola; Claus Adam, cello) on 19 April 1958 in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., as part of