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They are currently the USA’s hippest string quartet export: the Isidore String Quartet. Only three years after its founding, the New York-based ensemble won the 14th Banff Competition, followed by an Avery Fisher Career Grant one year later, catapulting the quartet to the top league of chamber music. The eponymous Isidore is the violinist Isidore Cohen, a former member of the legendary Juilliard String Quartet, in whose spirit the musicians combine tradition and innovation. They consider quartet playing not as an elite artform, but as the medium of an approachable, shared musical experience. In this spirit, they are also protagonists of the project »Music Heals Us«, giving underprivileged people access to classical music. And as if all that weren’t enough, there is the concert program, which combines Mozart’s so-called »Dissonance Quartet« and Dvořák’s Opus 106 with a work by the American jazz musician and composer Billy Childs.

With their “polished sonority and well-balanced, tightly synchronized ensemble” (Chicago Classical Review), the young Isidore Quartet has swiftly soared to prominence, winning the 2022 Banff Competition and a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant. Now, they present a new work written for them by foremost American composer and Grammy-winning jazz pianist Billy Childs. Jeremy Denk, “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs” (The New York Times) joins them for Schumann’s expansive Piano Quintet.