A member of the GRAMMY®-nominated Dallas String Quartet, which bills itself as “Where Bach Meets Bon Jovi” and has charted at Number 1 on Billboard. Less than three weeks ago their newest album was released, titled, “A String Quartet Tribute to Taylor Swift,” which was done alongside a alongside 4x GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer, mixer, and producer. They have performed for two presidents and collaborated with artists including Ed Sheeran and Luke Combs, appeared at the Academy of Country Music Awards, and famously performed at the wedding of Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton. They are one of the most streamed crossover string groups in the world with over 50 million streams on Spotify, where they have approximately 162 thousand monthly listeners.
“On our tours, we add drums and guitar and so it becomes a little bit bigger. And so, doing the concerts, it helps us to create bigger experiences.”
“We try to build through orchestration and start maybe smaller in the first verse. We like to add a lot of variety on some of them. For example, we'd start with long string pads and in a second verse we would do more, like different things … that will add different texture to the song that you don't normally hear in the first time. So, it feels a little bit different. So, we try to use harmonies and instrumentation to build and so bring that art to where the song feels fresh, whether it's the first or second verse.”
“A lot of our audience is used to more of the acoustic vibe of the group, on the recordings, but in the live concerts we do have percussion, and we do have additional instruments, so in theory it's easier live because we don't want to put a drum set on the recording because our audience is not used to that.”
“I've been doing music since I was six. My parents are musicians. My grandparents are musicians. And so, it was quite a journey. And then I studied there at the conservatory and when I moved (from Romania), I started at LSU and then transferred to SMU.”
“I have to recognize the blessing that it is to be able to do what I do and be able to have a career out of it.
“At the beginning we were selling two to three hundred albums in two, three hours live performance… and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh … we've stumbled upon something here’.”
“That's the hardest part as a musician because you don't know what you're supposed to do, how you're supposed to do it, and it's just a lot of trial and error. And we got some things right and some things wrong.”
“Touring is not easy. Touring takes a lot of energy, and I have one child, he’s 11, a little boy, and I… don’t know, do I want to be 100 days out of the year on the road and not see my son grow up?”
“When I first started looking to the crossover I went to Berkeley and studied some jazz and improvisation and all my confidence from the classical world came and I was like oh my gosh I don't know anything.”
“I believe that a beautiful melody, it's a beautiful melody no matter when it was written, whether it was written in 1700 by Mozart or in 2026 by Bruno Mars.”
“I just think that sometimes we sell ourselves short on the power that resides in us and the creativity
that God gave us. We all have something in us.”
“If you don't have the power to dream, how much we're missing out… on so much just because we don't dare to dream because we're afraid of criticism.”
“Cruel Summer”
“The Fate of Ophelia”