The Hampton String Quartet

James Manheim, All Music Guide wrote this: In the quite successful small industry of making string quartet versions of rock and pop music, the Hampton String Quartet has been one of the more durable players. Joining forces in the mid-'80s not long after the Kronos Quartet released its version of "Purple Haze," the members of the quartet were trained at The Juilliard School and have cultivated independent careers in the classical and soundtrack spheres. Their activities as a quartet, however, have been focused entirely upon arrangements of classic rock and pieces by the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Jimi Hendrix. They have also provided string quartet parts for recordings by quite a number of top pop recording artists, ranging from Michael Jackson to, more recently, Britney Spears (on "Heart," included on the Your #1 Requests...And More! album originally distributed through the McDonald's restaurant chain). Its four-CD "What If Mozart Wrote" series on the RCA label, featuring Mozart-ized versions of such favorites as "Born to Be Wild" and even "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" has achieved sales of a reported over 1 million copies, and the quartet has continued to attract audiences to such top venues as Carnegie Hall and London's Queen Elizabeth Hall even as other copycat quartets have followed with music in a similar vein. They have appeared on NBC's Today Show and on the BBC, among numerous other broadcast and cable outlets. In 1988, the quartet earned a Grammy nomination for best concept video with its rendition of the Silhouettes' "Get a Job." The Hampton String Quartet is composed of Regis Iandiorio (first violin), Abe Appleman (second violin), Richard Maximoff (viola), and John Reed (cello and principal arranger); all except Appleman are original members. Their concerts include such rock trappings as smoke and lighting manipulation in addition to amplification. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.