The LaSalle String Quartet has long been one of the most respected chamber music ensembles of the day. The group was founded in 1949 by four students at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. Its name was taken neither from the pre-World War II, second-line Cadillac automobile nor directly from the French explorer, but rather from the short and not very elegant street just down Claremont Avenue from the old Juilliard building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

The LaSalle has been quartet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music since 1953, and has toured extensively in the United States and Europe. Three of its present members, including violinists Walter Levin and Henry Meyer and violist Peter Kamnitzer, all founders of the group, were born in Germany in the early 1930s; cellist Lee Fiser, who joined in 1975, was born in Oregon in 1947. The predominantly European origin of its members, another example of Hitler’s unintended musical gifts to the United States, has combined with the numerous recordings made by the quartet for Deutsche Grammophon to create the image of a European quartet providentially living and teaching in a foreign, albeit hospitable, country.

To its credit, the LaSalle, like the indubitably American Juilliard Quartet—but unlike such stars of the chamber music world as the Amadeus Quartet in England, the Quartetto Italiano in Italy, and the Cleveland Quartet here—has never been content in its recordings to mine the known riches of the nineteenth-century repertory. Though