How long have you been playing as a quartet and how did you meet?

We formed in our first week at the Royal Academy of Music, a scary 13 years ago! Kerenza, Jenny and I had already met some years before in the National Youth Orchestra and decided to form a quartet when we started at the Academy we needed a viola player, so on day one we grabbed the unsuspecting Natalia, who had just arrived from Portugal at the tender age of 17. We actually owe our name to Natalia: Pav‹o is Portuguese for Peacock, which is Kerenza's surname.

Is it hard work getting a new string quartet off the ground? I imagine it's quite competitive?

It can be hard forming a quartet  not only do you have to be compatible in terms of playing, you also have to get on. We were very lucky that we were well-matched in both respects. This was essential for us, as over the next ten years we spent more time with each other than with our families and boyfriends. Being in a quartet is like a marriage. We hear stories of quartets who deliberately travel on separate aeroplanes and stay in different hotels, but apart from the odd squabble we're generally nice to each other! There weren't many young quartets around when we formed, but these days it's very competitive. The Academy was incredibly supportive of us and from very early on was recommending us for external engagements. We found that each time we did a recital, someone in the audience would ask us to perform elsewhere. Things snowballed so that by the time we left college, we were working full-time as a quartet.

For about the first ten years we played together almost every day. We would rehearse as if we had a normal eight-hour working day. In one of our busiest periods we had a recital or engagement on average every three days for a year. Every New Year we would make a resolution to give ourselves at least two days off per week, but it never lasted more than a month, as something would always come in to fill the diary. For two of these years we had a Leverhulme Fellowship at the RAM, so were effectively paid to rehearse. So far we've managed to learn over eighty quartets, but there are still so many pieces we'd love to play. Recently we've done less rehearsing, because Jenny and Natalia have started families & it's hard to rehearse with a baby under each arm! Now our rehearsals are in shorter, more intensive bursts (which sadly means less time to chat) normally for a week or so before a recital.

Sometimes our repertoire is dictated by music clubs asking for a particular piece; at other times we plan according to forthcoming recordings and sometimes we learn pieces that one or other of us has been wanting to play for ages. All our decisions are group-led and we try to be as diplomatic as possible. We don't have a manager as such, but we do have Kerenza, who is a PR genius. We do actively try and find work, although lots of engagements come via word-of-mouth. One of the good things about a string quartet is that we don't require much space to perform; although we sometimes play in huge concert halls, we can, and frequently do, fit into peoples' living rooms too! Being played on the radio also helps with promotion (we've been played on BBC1, 2 and 3 and are regularly featured on Classic FM) as does releasing CDs.

We were so excited when we got the chance to record our first CD. Landor Records approached us and asked if we'd like to record for them & of course we said yes! Our first CD for them was called Someone to Watch Over Me and was a collection of songs from the Great American Songbook, arranged for quartet by our friend Carlo Martelli. Although we originally used these as encores, people loved them so much we were getting asked to do whole programmes of them, so knew the CD would sell well. Our next albums were released by Discrete Records: the first featured quartets by Elgar and Bax, the second, Dreaming was a collection of songs and lullabies relating to the moon. Carlo was back in action for our fourth CD, for which he created some beautiful arrangements of Christmas carols. This disc was released under our own record label, Discadia, and each year we send a percentage of the proceeds to Breakthrough Breast Cancer. It was a great moment when we went into HMV and saw two of our albums in the best sellers section at the same time!

Although the vast array of amazing music by composers such as Janacek and Beethoven will always be at the heart of what we do, we also love to be versatile. As a quartet, and individually, we have recorded for artists such as Adele, Robbie Williams, Cee-Lo Green, Noel Gallagher and The Kooks, and have also had fun playing live with the likes of Robert Downey Jnr., Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney and Elton John. We've also recorded for film and TV, most recently for Rick Stein's latest cookery series. Another collaboration we always look forward to is with the Henri Oguike Dance Company, who have completely changed our take on Shostakovich's String Quartet No.9. They are an amazing group of dancers who we've been lucky to travel to many spectacular places with.

Travel is one of my favourite aspects of what we do & when I was young I never dreamed I would one day be camping in the desert in Oman (which was wonderful until Kerenza's campbed collapsed in the middle of the night and we discovered snake trails underneath our beds in the morning) shopping in Souks, seeing the Northern Lights, sailing amongst icebergs off the coast of Greenland, spending my birthday on the Great Wall of China, wishing for a Grammy at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. The only continent on which we haven't yet performed is Australasia. We're continually surprised by the beauty we meet on our travels in Britain, where we've encountered some wonderful villages and people alike. One place was made special by a power cut an hour before our concert, which meant that all the locals donated candles and we did a beautiful candlelit concert & until we looked down at the front row to see four ladies waiting with buckets of cold water to throw at us, should our instruments catch fire! I have never had a boring day at work.

member of a string quartet Salary: varies from playing for hundreds of pounds to playing for a pizza!

travelling the world with three great friends; getting the chance to play some of the best music ever written.

doing a concert with food poisoning and being sick between each movement of Death and the Maiden!

practise, practise, practise, both individually and as a group. Take as many opportunities as you can to participate in master classes.