EPSG:4326

Calidore Quartet

Berger Center

​​Featuring the next generation of string quartets and young performers.

Calidore String Quartet Seminar - Seminar Fellow Concert I

University of Delaware

Co-Artistic Director of CMS since 2004, cellist David Finckel’s dynamic musical career has included performances on the world’s stages in the roles of recitalist, chamber artist, and orchestral soloist. The first American student of Mstislav Rostropovich, he joined the Emerson String Quartet in 1979, and during 34 seasons garnered nine Grammy Awards and the Avery Fisher Prize. His quartet performances and recordings include quartet cycles of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Brahms, Bartók, and Shostakovich, as well as collaborative masterpieces and commissioned works. In 1997, he and pianist Wu Han founded ArtistLed, the first internet-based, artist-controlled classical recording label. ArtistLed’s catalog of more than 20 releases includes the standard literature for cello and piano, plus works composed for the duo by George Tsontakis, Gabriela Lena Frank, Bruce Adolphe, Lera Auerbach, Edwin Finckel, Augusta Read Thomas, and Pierre Jalbert. In 2022, Music@Menlo, an innovative summer chamber music festival in Silicon Valley founded and directed by David and Wu Han, celebrated its 20th season. As a young student, David was winner of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s junior and senior divisions, resulting in two performances with the orchestra. Having taught extensively with the late Isaac Stern in America, Israel, and Japan, he is currently a professor at both the Juilliard School and Stony Brook University, and oversees both CMS’s Bowers Program and Music@Menlo’s Chamber Music Institute. David’s 100 online Cello Talks, lessons on cello technique, are viewed by an international audience of musicians. Along with Wu Han, he was the recipient of Musical America’s 2012 Musicians of the Year Award.

Calidore String Quartet Seminar - David Finckel String Quartet Masterclass

​Almita Vamos is a graduate of the Juilliard School where she studied with Mischa Mischakoff and Louis Persinger. Almita Vamos has won the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching six times, the ASTA Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award, and has been featured on "Sunday Morning" CBS and in the New York Times best-selling book, Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mom by Amy Chua. Mrs. Vamos has served on the violin faculty of Western Illinois University, University of Minnesota, the Oberlin Conservatory, and Northwestern University. Mrs. Vamos is currently on the faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago and spends summers teaching at the Chautauqua Summer Music Institute. Mrs. Vamos' students have won top prizes in many national competitions including Klein, Stuhlburg, Johannsen, Corpus Christi, Kingsville; and international competitions including Tchaikovsky, Carl Flesch, Menuhin, Bach (Leipzig), Szigeti, Kreisler, Neilsen, Paganini, and Montreal. Her students play in many orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, and many others. She was a member of the Lydian Trio and the Antioch Quartet, and has recorded under Coronet and Rizzoli labels. She has concertized throughout North, Central, and South America, Europe, and Asia. Her recitals in New York won praise from the New York Times and Herald Tribune. She won the Concert Artist Guild Award, among many other prizes, and has performed recitals at the 92nd Street Y, Town Hall, and Carnegie Recital Hall. She continues to perform as a soloist and chamber musician in America and abroad. Mrs. Vamos and her husband have recently commissioned and recorded works for violin and viola by living composers in Chicago.

Calidore String Quartet Seminar - Almita Vamos Violin Masterclass

​The Calidore String Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of a vast chamber music repertory, from the cycles of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to works of celebrated contemporary voices like György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann, and Caroline Shaw. For more than a decade, the Calidore has enjoyed performances and residencies in the world’s major venues and festivals, released multiple critically acclaimed recordings, and won numerous awards. The Los Angeles Times described the musicians as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching.” The New York Times noted the Quartet’s “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct,” and the Washington Post wrote that “four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one”. The New York City based Calidore String Quartet has appeared in venues throughout North America, Europe, and Asia including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Brussels’ BOZAR, Cologne Philharmonie, Seoul’s Kumho ArtsHall, and at major festivals such as the BBC Proms, Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, Music@Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk, and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Always seeking new commissioning opportunities, the Quartet has given world premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Anna Clyne, Han Lash, Huw Watkins and Mark-Anthony Turnage and collaborated with artists such as Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Marc-André Hamelin, Joshua Bell, Emerson String Quartet, Jeffrey Kahane, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan, Lawrence Power, Sharon Isbin, David Finckel and Wu Han. Highlights of the 23-24 season include return appearances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and People’s Symphony in New York as well as concerts in Seattle, Palm Beach, Ottawa, Toronto, Kalamazoo and a European tour of United Kingdom, Estonia and Germany. The Calidore team up with pianist and composer Gabriela Montero for a world premiere of her new piano quintet at the GilmorePiano Festival (MI) and also enjoy collaborations with the violist Matthew Lipman and harpist Bridget Kibbey, with whom they will premiere a new work by Sebastian Currier. Last season, the Calidore joined the Emerson String Quartet on their farewell tour in the Mendelssohn Octet and collaborated with clarinetist Anthony McGill and bassist Xavier Foley. The Quartet members also performed at Carnegie Hall alongside Anne-Sophie Mutter in a memorial concert honoring André Previn, featuring his compositions. In their most ambitious recording project to date, the Calidore is set to release the complete Beethoven’sString Quartets for Signum Records in the 24/25 season. Volume I, containing the late quartets, was released in 2023 to great critical acclaim. BBC Music Magazine said the Calidore’s performances “penetrate right to the heart of the music” and “can stand comparison with the best.” Their previous recordings on Signum include titles Babel with music by Schumann, Shaw and Shostakovich, and Resilience with works by Prokofiev, Janáček, Golijov and Mendelssohn. The Calidore String Quartet was founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010. Within two years,the quartet won grand prizes in virtually all the major US chamber music competitions, including the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs competitions, and it captured top prizes at the 2012ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the International Chamber Music Competition Hamburg. The Quartet first made international headlines as the winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition and it was the first and only North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. The Calidore was also named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and in 2018, it was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant, having won the LincolnCenter Emerging Artist Award a year prior. The Calidore is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York. In 2021 the Calidore members joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music and serve as artistic directors of the newly established Graduate String Quartet Fellowship Residency and their own concert series at the University of Delaware. Prior to taking this position, they served as artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto, University of Michigan and Stony Brook University. Now dedicated teachers and passionate supporters of music education themselves, the Calidore is grateful to have been mentored by the Emerson Quartet, Quatuor Ébène, Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, David Finckel, Günter Pichler, Guillaume Sutre, Paul Coletti, and Ronald Leonard. The Calidore String Quartet plays the following instruments: Jeffrey Myers plays a violin by Giovanni Battista Guadagnini “Eisenberg” c.1775, loaned by a private benefactor and plays a bow by Francois Tourte c.1805. Ryan Meehan plays a violin by Vincenzo Panormo c.1775 and a bow by Joseph Henry. Jeremy Berry plays a viola by Giovanni Battista Ceruti c.1811, owned by a private benefactor and a 1903 Umberto Muschietti viola and plays a bow by Pierre Simon. Estelle Choi plays a cello by Charles Jacquot c.1830​

Calidore String Quartet Seminar - Opening Concert

Virtuoso harpist Bridget Kibbey and the Calidore String Quartet perform a haunting musical adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death with narrator Mervon Mehta, alongside works by Bach, Debussy, Fauré, and more.

Bridget Kibbey with the Calidore String Quartet and Mervon Mehta, narrator

The Royal Conservatory of Music

Each weekday of the festival at 11:00 a.m., our “Mornings@Menlo” sessions feature either a master class with the Chamber Music Institute’s young artists, or a Café Conversation. The Institute’s master classes offer visitors the opportunity to witness the exchange between artist and apprentice, and culminate in the festival’s series of Prelude Performances and Koret Young Performers Concerts.

Master Class With Calidore String Quartet

Menlo School Campus

Music@Menlo’s Café Conversations explore a multitude of topics from unique perspectives. This distinctive series of free and informal discussion events led by festival musicians and distinguished guests offers audiences an engaging forum to explore music, art, and culture.

Café Conversation: Preparing The Beethoven Quartet Cycle

Praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible instinct,” the Calidore String Quartet won grand prizes in virtually every U.S. chamber music competition (including Coleman) within two years of its founding at the Colburn School in Los Angeles.

Calidore String Quartet

Beckman Auditorium

After 12 appearances on our series since 1979, 9 GRAMMY awards, and more than 30 celebrated recordings, the legendary Emerson String Quartet returns one last time as they make the final tour of their venerated 47-year career. Their program embodies the bittersweet nature of this occasion: pairing Shostakovich’s tragic final string quartet with one of the most life-affirming works in all of music history, Mendelssohn’s treasured string octet. Joining them for an encore performance on our series of this beloved octet are the Emerson’s protégés, the Calidore String Quartet. Come be a part of this momentous celebration as we experience this symbolic passing of the baton—or bow, as it were—from one generation to the next as we close our 129th Concert Classics series, both marking a historic moment and looking to the future.

Emerson & Calidore String Quartets

Richardson Auditorium

Emerson String Quartet & Calidore String Quartet

In his String Quartet in A-flat major, Op.105, Dvořák fuses his profound love for his country’s folk music with a technical mastery gleaned from Schubert and Brahms to create an inspired, poignant masterpiece of chamber music.

Inside Chamber Music: Dvořák’s String Quartet in A-flat major

Rose Studio

Witness the harp’s dramatic entrance to the concert stage via masterworks from 19th Century France….the French Belle Époque!
With virtuosic sweeps, opulent arpeggiations, to the most intimate sonorities Bridget Kibbey and the Calidore Quartet team up to share tales of love, death, and the macabre via masters of color: Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and André Caplet. From behind the harp, and behind the microphone, Kibbey will cast a light on how Debussy changed the way we hear harmony, how Fauré and Caplet were watching and responding, and how the harp turns itself from the most sacred of personas…to the of harbinger of death, via Edgar Allen Poe’s infamous short story “The Mask of the Red Death.”

Bridget Kibbey with Calidore String Quartet

Saint Anthony Park United Church of Christ

This eclectic program celebrates both a beloved instrument and classical music’s most rigorous contrapuntal form. Arguably the king of musical innovators, Joseph Haydn took from the past and created the future, as in his Opus 20 Quartet which begins with a cello solo (a historical first) and concludes with a lively fugue that could have come straight from the pen of J.S. Bach. From cellist-composers Luigi Boccherini and Michael Finckel (David Finckel’s cousin) to the Frenchman Alexandre Tansman and the Russian Aleksandr Glazunov, we will hear cellos throughout this concert in delightful combinations, even cello quartets, with exhilarating fugues popping up unexpectedly.

CONCERT PROGRAM IV Cellos And Fugues

Visual artists captured the exhilaration, drama, and deadliness of the hunt, and composers were similarly inspired, replicating the sonics and spirit of the chase through music. Indeed, Joseph Haydn’s very first quartet is subtitled La chasse, which opens with the iconic sound of hunting horns. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s quartet bears the same nickname, for good reason. A century later, Johannes Brahms alluded to the hunt in his final quartet, and in Jörg Widmann’s delightfully macabre Hunting Quartet, the cellist, playing the role of the animal, is pursued by her colleagues and issues a blood-curdling scream of death near the conclusion.

CONCERT PROGRAM III The Thrill of the Hunt

Join us for an unforgettable evening of classical music at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center with the "Beethoven Quartet Cycle IV." This remarkable concert will take place on Tuesday, February 4, 2025, at 7:30 pm in the iconic Alice Tully Hall, located at 1941 Broadway at W 65th St, New York, NY 10023. The performance will last approximately 2 hours, including an intermission, offering audiences a profound immersion into the genius of Ludwig van Beethoven.

The program for the evening features three of Beethoven's string quartets, showcasing the composer's evolution and depth. The Calidore String Quartet, an ensemble celebrated for its virtuosity and dramatic instinct, will perform the Quartet in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 74, "Harp" from 1809; the Quartet in F minor for Strings, Op. 95, "Serioso" from 1810-11; and the Quartet in E-flat major for Strings, Op. 127 from 1824-25. These pieces highlight Beethoven's innovative spirit and the emotional breadth of his work.

The Calidore String Quartet, praised by The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times for their astonishing depth and sublimity, brings a fresh and insightful interpretation to these masterpieces. Having received numerous awards and accolades, including the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the quartet promises an evening of unparalleled musical excellence.

Tickets for this not-to-be-missed event are not yet on sale but keep an eye out for updates. This performance is a key highlight of the Chamber Music Society's season, offering a unique opportunity to experience the profound beauty and complexity of Beethoven's quartets live.

For more information and to plan your visit, please refer to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's website. Don't miss this chance to witness the Calidore String Quartet's tribute to Beethoven's enduring legacy.

Beethoven Quartet Cycle IV

Lincoln Center

Join us for an unforgettable musical experience with the Calidore String Quartet at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. This esteemed ensemble, celebrated for its virtuosity and dramatic instinct, will grace the stage at the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio on Tuesday, February 6, 2025, at 11:00 am. The performance, lasting 2 hours with no intermission, promises to immerse you in the depths of chamber music.

The Calidore String Quartet, a beacon of excellence in the chamber music world, has garnered international acclaim and numerous awards, including the prestigious 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. Their repertoire spans from timeless classics to contemporary masterpieces, highlighted by their recent album "BABEL" which features works by Schumann, Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw.

This performance is not just a concert but an educational journey, offering insights into the art of interpretation and technique. It's a rare opportunity to gain an insider's perspective from the artists themselves, making it a must-attend for both seasoned chamber music aficionados and newcomers alike.

The event will take place at the Daniel and Joanna S. Rose Studio at CMS, located in the Rose Building at 165 West 65th Street, New York, NY 10023. Tickets are not yet on sale but keep an eye out for this highly anticipated event. Don't miss your chance to witness the Calidore String Quartet's breathtaking performance and be part of a memorable musical experience.

Samuel B. & David Rose Building

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Master Class: The Calidore String Quartet

The Calidore String Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of a vast chamber music repertory, from the cycles of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to works of celebrated contemporary voices like György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann, and Caroline Shaw.

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

The Calidore String Quartet, founded in 2010, has swiftly risen to prominence as one of the world's leading interpreters of chamber music. Renowned for their deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct, the quartet has captivated audiences globally. Comprising Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan on violins, Jeremy Berry on viola, and Estelle Choi on cello, the ensemble is celebrated for their cohesive and dynamic performances. Their repertoire spans from the classical masterpieces of Beethoven and Mendelssohn to the innovative works of contemporary composers like Caroline Shaw and Anna Clyne. The Calidore String Quartet has graced prestigious venues such as Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, and the Berlin Konzerthaus, and has been featured in major festivals including the BBC Proms and MusicMenlo. Their critically acclaimed recordings, including the ambitious complete cycle of Beethoven’s String Quartets, showcase their exceptional artistry. The quartet's commitment to music education is evident through their roles as faculty members at the University of Delaware and their numerous residencies at esteemed institutions. With a name that reflects their Californian roots and golden aspirations, the Calidore String Quartet continues to enchant and inspire with their profound musical interpretations.

War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

Join the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for an unforgettable evening as part of their Beethoven Quartet Cycle VI. This prestigious event will take place on Sunday, May 18, 2025, at 5:00 pm in the iconic Alice Tully Hall, located at 1941 Broadway at W 65th St, New York, NY 10023. The performance, lasting approximately 2 hours including intermission, promises to be a profound exploration of Ludwig van Beethoven's genius, featuring two of his remarkable string quartets.

The program includes:
- Quartet in C-sharp minor for Strings, Op. 131, composed in 1825-26
- Quartet in F major for Strings, Op. 135, Beethoven's final string quartet, composed in 1826

These pieces will be brought to life by the acclaimed Calidore String Quartet, an ensemble celebrated for its virtuosity, dramatic instinct, and the balance of intellect and expression. The quartet, a recipient of numerous awards including the 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, has been praised by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times for its astonishing performances that approach a sublime experience.

The Calidore String Quartet's reputation is built on its deep commitment to the chamber music repertoire, as evidenced by their international acclaim and collaborations with esteemed artists and ensembles. Their performance at Alice Tully Hall is part of their ongoing relationship with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where they are recognized as season artists.

Don't miss this opportunity to experience the depth and beauty of Beethoven's late string quartets, interpreted by one of the most dynamic quartets of our time. Tickets are not yet on sale but be sure to mark your calendar and stay tuned for the opportunity to secure your seats for this monumental event. For more information, visit the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's website or sign up for their email list to get the inside scoop on concerts, offers, news, and more.

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Beethoven Quartet Cycle IV

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Calidore String Quartet

Feb 6, 2025

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center Master Class: The Calidore String Quartet

Mar 6, 2025

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Calidore String Quartet Seminar - Seminar Fellow Concert I

Calidore String Quartet