Internationally recognized as one of the world's finest quartets, the American String Quartet has spent decades honing the luxurious sound for which it is famous. The Quartet celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2019, and, in its years of touring, has performed in all fifty states and has appeared in the most important concert halls worldwide. The group’s presentations of the complete quartets of Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Bartók, and Mozart have won widespread critical acclaim, and their MusicMasters Complete Mozart String Quartets, performed on a matched quartet set of instruments by Stradivarius, are widely considered to have set the standard for this repertoire.  

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American String Quartet w/ Wendy Chen

Central United Methodist Church

The Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its profound musical insight and rare tonal beauty. A former BBC New Generation Artist and recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the quartet has performed at the BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall and is a regular guest at Wigmore Hall. In its home town of New York, the ensemble serves as season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

The 2021-2022 season finds the Escher Quartet touring the U.S. extensively, performing in numerous cities and venues including New York’s Alice Tully Hall and Rockefeller University, Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, La Jolla Music Society, Savannah Music Festival, and Chamber Music Society of Detroit. Internationally, the quartet returns to Wigmore Hall in London and the Sociedad Filarmonica de Bilbao.

Escher Quartet w/ Jason Vieaux

Winners of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022, the New York City-based Isidore String Quartet was formed in 2019 with a vision to revisit, rediscover, and reinvigorate the repertory.  The quartet is heavily influenced by the Juilliard String Quartet and the idea of ‘approaching the established as if it were brand new, and the new as if it were firmly established.’

 The members of the quartet are violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon, violist Devin Moore, and cellist Joshua McClendon. The four began as an ensemble at the Juilliard School, and following a break during the global pandemic reconvened at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in the summer of 2021 under the tutelage of Joel Krosnick.  In addition to Mr. Krosnick, the ISQ has coached with Joseph Lin, Astrid Schween, Laurie Smukler, Joseph Kalichstein, Roger Tapping, Timothy Eddy, Donald Weilerstein, Atar Arad, Robert McDonald, Christoph Richter, Miriam Fried, and Paul Biss, while performing in venues such as Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, and at the Ravinia Festival.

Isidore Quartet

The GRAMMY® Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer is known around the world as “an orchestra of voices” for its wide-ranging repertoire and dazzling virtuosity.  Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer quickly took its place as one of the most prolific recording and touring ensembles in the world, selling over one million recordings and performing thousands of live concerts to audiences around the world.

Chanticleer’s repertoire is rooted in the renaissance, and has continued to expand to include a wide range of classical, gospel, jazz, popular music, and a deep commitment to the commissioning of new compositions and arrangements. The ensemble has committed much of its vast recording catalogue to these commissions, garnering GRAMMY® Awards for its recording of Sir John Tavener’s “Lamentations & Praises”, and the ambitious collection of commissioned works entitled “Colors of Love”.  Chanticleer is the recipient of the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming, and its Music Director Emeritus Joseph H. Jennings received the Brazeal Wayne Dennard Award for his contribution to the African-American choral tradition during his tenure with Chanticleer. 

Chanticleer

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

The Paris based Quatuor Modigliani, founded in 2003, is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023. It is a regular guest at the world’s top venues and finest String Quartet and Chamber Music series. In 2017 it was a special honor for the quartet to be the first string quartet ever performing in the big hall of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. In 2020, the quartet became artistic director of the string quartet festival “Quatuors à Bordeaux” as well as the renowned “The Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition”.

For the Quatuor Modigliani’s anniversary celebration, Jean Frédéric Neuburger composed a new string quartet that will be performed throughout Europe in the upcoming anniversary season 2022/2023, including concerts in Madrid, Warsaw, Paris and London. Since the past season, the quartet has been focusing on the composer Franz Schubert’s 225th anniversary in 2022 and will maintain this focus also in the new season with e.g. a three-part Schubert-cycle at the Musikfest Hamburg in May 2023. Other highlights include an extensive US Tour in April 2023 or performances at the Philharmonic Halls in Luxembourg, Köln and Oslo.

Modigliani Quartet w/ Fabio Bidini

The musicians of the Faure Quartett are pioneers in many ways. After they met during their studies in 1995 in Karlsruhe for the 150th anniversary of Gabriel Faure, they quickly realized, that this combination offered new insights into undiscovered repertoire. In 2006, they signed a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, promoting them to the Champions League of the classic music business. They made highly regarded benchmark-recordings with works by Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn and pop songs from Peter Gabriel and Steely Dan as well as works from Mahler and Richard Strauss (Sony Classical). on one album. Currently the quartett is releasing the world’s first-ever recording of Mussorgskys “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Rachmaninovs “Etudes-Tableaux” in their own arrangements on the Berlin Classics label.

Fauré Quartett

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields was founded by Sir Neville Marriner in 1958 and is currently led by Music Director Joshua Bell. In 1967, the Academy Chamber Ensemble was formed to perform the larger scale chamber music repertoire with players who customarily worked together, instead of the usual string quartet with additional guests. Drawn from the principal players of the orchestra, the Chamber Ensemble’s touring commitments are extensive and include regular tours of Europe and North America, whilst recording contracts with Philips Classics, Hyperion, and Chandos have led to the release of over thirty CDs.

The Chamber Ensemble now performs in multiple configurations, including the Academy Wind Ensemble, which makes its US debut with pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips in the 2021-22 season, performing programs featuring the quintets of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms, among other works.

Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Winds & Piano

Four-hand piano pieces bring musicians as close as they can get to the ultimate in collegial music-making. The piano trio, with just one additional musician, generates all the excitement and passion of an entire orchestra. Romantics Brahms and Arensky mine the full range of these two genres to bring listeners an evening that begins with the wonder of childhood and ends with Brahms at the height of his dramatic powers.

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

Festival 14

Desert Botanical Garden

Musical Instrument Museum

ASU Kerr

The Dover Quartet draws from the lineage of the distinguished Guarneri, Cleveland, and Vermeer quartets. Its members studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, where they were mentored extensively by Shmuel Ashkenasi, James Dunham, Norman Fischer, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joseph Silverstein, Arnold Steinhardt, Michael Tree, and Peter Wiley. It was at Curtis that the Dover Quartet formed, and its name pays tribute to Dover Beach by fellow Curtis alumnus Samuel Barber.

Anna Polonsky is widely in demand as a soloist and chamber musician. She has appeared with the Moscow Virtuosi, the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, the Memphis Symphony, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, and many others. Ms. Polonsky has collaborated with the Guarneri, Orion, Daedalus, and Shanghai Quartets, and with such musicians as Mitsuko Uchida, Yo-Yo Ma, David Shifrin, Richard Goode, Emanuel Ax, Arnold Steinhardt, Peter Wiley, and Jaime Laredo. She has performed chamber music at festivals such as Marlboro, Chamber Music Northwest, Seattle, Music@Menlo, Cartagena, Bard, and Caramoor, as well as at Bargemusic in New York City.

Festival Concert at Central UMC

Los Angeles Piano Trio brings a new level of refinement, emotional depth and artistry to the piano trio repertoire, reflecting the City of Angels’ rich cultural legacy, global impact and vibrant energy. Venerated artists and long-time L.A. residents Fabio Bidini, piano, Margaret Batjer, violin, and Andrew Shulman, cello, founded the chamber ensemble in 2020, building upon their distinguished international careers as critically acclaimed soloists, chamber musicians, recording artists and pedagogues.

Finding great joy in playing together, which is palpable, the three like-minded musicians embrace the artistic freedom and warmth provided within the structure of the trio, enabling them to express their distinctive musical personalities while creating highly collaborative, inspiring chamber music performances. They present the core piano trio repertoire of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Dvorak and 20th Century gems by Shostakovich, Ravel and others, transporting audiences with their fresh, inventive interpretations, exceptional technical prowess and abiding musical passion. Additionally, they plan to introduce new and seldom-played works in seasons to come, mirroring LA’s own diverse arts scene, which, rooted in tradition, also sets trends around the globe.

For Bidini, Batjer and Shulman, who have performed together in various duo and ensemble combinations over the years, this project comes at the optimum time in their careers with each infusing Los Angeles Piano Trio with decades of wide-ranging musical experience at the highest echelon, for which they have garnered tremendous accolades.

Los Angeles Piano Trio

For over four decades on the concert stage, the Grammy® Award-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (LAGQ)  has continually set the standard for expression and virtuosity among guitar ensembles, while perennially exploring new musical landscapes. The charismatic LAGQ, is recognized as one of America’s premier instrumental ensembles and consistently play to sold-out houses worldwide. Their critically acclaimed transcriptions of concert masterworks provide a fresh look at the music of the past, while their interpretations of works from the contemporary and world-music realms continually break new ground. Latin, African, Far East, Irish, Folk and American influenced works transport listeners around the world in a single concert experience.

Los Angeles Guitar Quartet

The Orion Quartet is one of the leading chamber music ensembles on the classical music scene today. Admired for diverse programming that juxtaposes masterworks of quartet literature with key works of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Orion provides singularly rich dimension to its music-making. The members of the Orion String Quartet -- violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips, brothers who share the first violin chair equally, violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy -- have worked closely with illustrious musicians, such as Pablo Casals, Sir Andras Schiff, Rudolf Serkin, members of the ensemble TASHI, and the Beaux Arts Trio, as well as the Budapest, Galimir, and Guarneri String Quartets. The Orion String Quartet are Artist Members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

In the upcoming 2022-2023 season, the Quartet performs Beethoven String Quartet No. 16 in a winter concert for Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and appears again with both the Phoenix Chamber Music Society and Philadelphia Chamber Music Society.

Orion String Quartet

Tribute to Joseph Kalichstein

The three brothers Mark, Erik and Ken Schumann have been playing together since their earliest childhood – meanwhile violist Veit Hertenstein completes the quartet. The four musicians enjoy the way they communicate without words. Although the individual personalities clearly manifest themselves, a common space arises in every musical work in a process of spiritual metamorphosis. The quartet's openness and curiosity may be partly the result of the formative influence exerted on it by teachers such as Eberhard Feltz, the Alban Berg Quartet, or partners such as Menahem Pressler.

 Awards, CD releases – it is always tempting to speculate on what factors have led to many people viewing the Schumann Quartet as one of the best in the world. But the four musicians themselves regard these stages more as encounters, as a confirmation of the path they have taken. They feel that their musical development over the past two years represents a quantum leap. “We really want to take things to extremes, to see how far the excitement and our spontaneity as a group take us,” says Ken Schumann, the middle of the three Schumann brothers. They charmingly sidestep any attempt to categorise their sound, approach or style, and let the concerts speak for themselves.

Now in his third decade of touring worldwide, American pianist Jon Nakamatsu continues to draw critical and public acclaim for his intensity, elegance and electrifying solo, concerto and chamber music performances. Catapulted to international attention in 1997 as the Gold Medalist of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition—the only American to achieve this distinction since 1981—Mr. Nakamatsu subsequently developed a multi-faceted career that encompasses recording, education, arts administration and public speaking in addition to his vast concert schedule.

Schumann Quartett with Jon Nakamatsu, piano

The Rolston String Quartet – Luri Lee (violin), Jason Issokson (violin), Hezekiah Leung (viola), and Peter Eom (cello) – was formed in 2013 during a summer chamber music residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Alberta. It takes its name from Canadian violinist Thomas Rolston, founder and longtime director of the Banff Centre’s Music and Sound Programs. First-prize winner of the 2016 Banff International String Quartet Competition, and the 2018 recipient and first international ensemble chosen for Chamber Music America's prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, the quartet continues to receive acclamation and recognition for musical excellence.

Luri Lee plays a Carlo Tononi violin, generously on loan from Shauna Rolston Shaw. The Rolston String Quartet is endorsed by Jagar Strings of Denmark.

Phoenix Chamber Music Society

Apr 25, 2024

American String Quartet w/ Wendy Chen

Apr 12, 2024

Escher Quartet w/ Jason Vieaux

Phoenix Chamber Music Society