Applauded by The Washington Post as “a perfect encapsulation of today’s trends in chamber music,” and by The New Yorker as “independent-minded,” multi-GRAMMY®-nominated PUBLIQuartet is an improvising string quartet whose repertoire blends genres and highlights American multiculturalism. The quartet’s latest album, the GRAMMY®-nominated What Is American, released in June 2022 on the Bright Shiny Things label, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous musical traditions that inspired Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (Op. 96).

Harlem Quartet advances diversity in classical music while engaging new audiences with varied repertoire that includes works by minority composers. Their mission to share their passion with a wider audience has taken them around the world; from a 2009 performance at The White House for President Obama and First Lady, Michelle Obama, to a highly successful tour of South Africa in 2012, and numerous venues in between. The musically versatile ensemble has performed with such distinguished artists as Itzhak Perlman, Ida Kavafian, Carter Brey, Fred Sherry, Misha Dichter, Jeremy Denk, and Paquito D’Rivera. The quartet also collaborated with jazz masters Chick Corea and Gary Burton on the album Hot House, a 2013 multi-Grammy Award winning release.

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Harlem Quartet and PUBLIQuartet

Baruch College

Harlem Quartet has three distinctive characteristics: diverse programming that combines music from the standard string quartet canon with jazz, Latin, and contemporary works; a collaborative approach to performance that is continually broadening the ensemble’s repertoire and audience reach through artistic partnerships with other musicians from the classical and jazz worlds; and an ongoing commitment to residency activity and other forms of educational outreach.

Harlem Quartet

Central United Methodist Church

This film centers on two Afro-Cuban brothers, separated by geopolitics but united by music. Their moving relationship and musical reunion will engage all audiences. Both established in their careers—one is a jazz pianist and one is a violinist with the Grammy-winning Harlem Quartet.

Virtuoso Afro-Cuban-born brothers—violinist Ilmar and pianist Aldo—live on opposite sides of a geopolitical chasm a half-century wide. Tracking their parallel lives in New York and Havana, their poignant reunion, and their momentous first performances together, Los Hermanos/The Brothers offers a nuanced, often startling view of estranged nations through the lens of music and family.

Film: Los Hermanos/The Brothers

Shalin Liu Performance Center

Multi-Grammy nominated violinist/composer Curtis Stewart premieres new music with pianist and Kaufman Music Center Artist-in-Residence Aaron Diehl, Harlem Quartet and violin/vox/freestyle composition artist Mazz Swift.

Curtis Stewart – of Love / of time

Kaufman Music Center

Violinist/composer Curtis Stewart premieres new music with pianist and Kaufman Music Center Artist-in-Residence Aaron Diehl, Harlem Quartet, Mazz Swift, and a chamber orchestra of musicians from The Next Festival of Emerging Artists and Kaufman Music Center’s Special Music School, conducted by Peter Askim. Featuring the world premiere of Curtis’s ACO-commissioned work Embrace, the program brings new creative voices to the fore, in part through reinterpreting works from the past.

Ecstatic Music: Curtis Stewart of Love / of Time

The Grammy-winning quartet and Kaufman Music Center Artists-in-Residence perform music by Fanny Mendelssohn, Aldo López-Gavilán and more.

Experience the Exceptional as Carmel Symphony Orchestra under Artistic Director Janna Hymes makes it all about love with this pre-Valentine’s Day concert! From the classics of Wagner and Tchaikovsky to more contemporary music, this concert has something for all music listeners and lovers. The Harlem Quartet will join the CSO on an arrangement of the Leonard Bernstein West Side Story for string quartet and orchestra by Randall Craig Fleischer. This selection will feature Carmel’s very own Felix Umansky of the Harlem Quartet on cello.

Masterworks 3 Featuring The Harlem Quartet

The Center for the Performing Arts

New York-based Harlem Quartet, currently quartet-in-residence at the John J. Cali School of Music and the Royal College of Music in London, has been praised for its “panache” by The New York Times and hailed in the Cincinnati Enquirer for “bringing a new attitude to classical music, one that is fresh, bracing and intelligent.” It has also won plaudits from such veteran musicians as GRAMMY-winning woodwind virtuoso Ted Nash of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, who declared in a May 2018 Playbill article, “Harlem Quartet is one of the greatest string quartets I have ever heard. They can play anything.” Since its public debut at Carnegie Hall in 2006, the ensemble has thrilled audiences and students in 47 states as well as in the U.K., France, Belgium, Brazil, Panama, Canada, Venezuela, Japan, Ethiopia, and South Africa.

Harlem Quartet

Jan 29, 2025

Harlem Quartet

Jan 13, 2024

Harlem Quartet and PUBLIQuartet

Nov 11, 2023

Harlem Quartet

Harlem Quartet