Bach: Christmas Oratorio / Veldhoven, Et Al CD

The Modern Mandolin Quartet was formed in 1985 to give a new voice to that most American of musical instruments, the mandolin. Following the tradition of the mandolin orchestras and chamber groups from the early twentieth century, the MMQ uses the instruments of the mandolin family which correspond to the conventional string quartet (two mandolins, mandola, and mandocello).

The Modern Mandolin Quartet began recording in 1988 with Windham Hill/BMG; they have released five albums to date, with sales in excess of 130,000 units worldwide. In addition to their own albums, the group appears on samplers from Polygram Records, Well Tempered Productions, and Acoustic Disk. In 1994 the Quartet received a National Endowment for the Arts Chamber Music grant to tour and perform new American music. They are the 1995 recipients of a grant from the Meet the Composer/Lila Wallace - Reader's Digest Fund Commissioning Program, which funded David Balakrishnan's Interplay and Tully Cathey's Elements. These works premiered in 1997 at Merkin Hall in New York City; both are featured on their new release Interplay.

The Modern Mandolin Quartet members are Dana Rath and Matt Flinner (mandolins), Paul Binkley (mandola), and Gyan Riley (mandocello). The members of the Quartet come from diverse backgrounds including classical, jazz, rock, and folk.

To date the Quartet has arranged and performed over 100 works originally written for orchestra, chamber ensemble, piano, guitar, and string quartet, including arrangements of traditional classical music (Vivaldi, Bach, Corelli, Mozart, Ravel, Bernstein), string quartets (Mozart, Bartok, Dvorak, Villa-Lobos, Terry Riley), music from the mandolin's historical roots, (American Bluegrass, Brazilian Choro, Italian folk songs), and commissioned works ( David Jaffe, Tully Cathey, David Balakrishnan, Philip Bimstein, Larry Polansky, and Edgar Meyer).

Matt Flinner is widely considered one of the hottest mandolin players on the acoustic scene. He started out as a prodigy who was playing bluegrass festivals before he entered his teens, and won the national banjo contest at Winfield Kansas in 1990, and the mandolin award there the following year. He then attended the University of Utah at Salt Lake City where he obtained a degree in composition and performed with the Utah Symphony. Flinner has two solo album releases to his credit, The View From Here and Latitude, which feature an all-star cast of acoustic players including Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, David Grier and Darol Anger.