Experience the bold, expressive sound of the Poesis Quartet, Grand Prize winner at the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Formed in 2022 at Oberlin, the Quartet has swiftly risen to prominence, joining the Concert Artists Guild roster in 2024. Renowned for their cohesive artistry and adventurous programming, the group lives up to its name—poesis, from the Greek “to make”—with performances that forge new paths in chamber music. Dedicated to championing the voices of emerging and historically underrepresented composers, the Poesis Quartet brings this vibrant mission to life in their Caramoor residency.

Poiesis Quartet

The Rosen House at Caramoor

Jack Sheen debuts new work from right across the UK music scene – from his own A line, a curve, or figure, to introducing sparkling new voices to our concert platform, Sky Macklay and Sylvia Lim. Tonight also features two world premieres from local sources: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s Timothy Jackson, with his solo work for the Orchestra’s Principal Cello, Jonathan Aasgaard, and a work for chamber orchestra from Stephen Pratt, who has contributed so much to Ensemble 10:10 and Liverpool’s music scene over the years.

Ensemble 10:10

Yoko Ono Lennon Centre

London Sinfonietta travels to the future with three UK premieres and a favourite past commission. Sky Macklay’s Microvariations will lull you into a false sense of tonality before whisking you on a whistle-stop, microtonal tour of 19th Century European orchestras, “a fast-forward and transcontinental sonic truncation and fantasy on” the journey of British conductor George Thomas Smart and his tuning fork in 1825. In George Lewis’ lively Tales of the Traveller, the eponymous hero travels the limits of imagination: the piece allows a soloist total free reign to improvise against a notated ensemble part. After the interval, Katherine Balch’s “serenade to lost or wasted time” plays a soprano soloist against four hand-held cassette tape recorders to distort and fragment our memory of the piece even as it is played, while the programme is rounded off by Michel van der Aa’s latest commission for the ensemble, Shades of Red, which illustrates the different perceived properties of the colour red, alongside a soundtrack which confronts the players with their own warped and distorted soundworld.

New Traditions

Southbank Centre

SLSO string players summon intense color and bold abstraction. Quartets take us on kaleidoscopic journeys through Sky Macklay’s angular reimagination of the familiar cadence and Molly Joyce’s reflection on perfection. Michael Gordon and Leilehua Lanzilotti revel in the emotive beauty of solo instruments. A lone marimba breaks up the string party in Andy Akiho’s virtuosic and percussive banger.

EPSG:4326

Live at the Pulitzer: Line and Light

Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Celebrated for their “multifaceted artistry” and “brilliantly idiomatic” programming (New York Times), the Poiesis Quartet is the winner of the 2026 Cleveland Quartet Award and the First Prize and Commission Prize recipients of the 2025 Banff International String Quartet Competition. They will perform works from the canon by Joseph Haydn and Sergei Prokofiev alongside contemporary works by Sky Macklay, Chickasaw classical composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, and a newly commissioned work by Kevin Lau.

Sky Macklay

Events

Upcoming events

May 31, 2026

Poiesis Quartet · Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College

Past events

Nov 16, 2025

Poiesis Quartet · Caramoor

Jun 19, 2024

Ensemble 10:10 · Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

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