A Trio of Quartets - October 25, 2020 Online

Front Row Mainstage: A Trio of Quartets

Experience the peerless artistry of Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (CMS) with newly curated full-length HD concerts featuring archival video recordings woven together into never-before-heard concert pairings. This event will stream online for free.

Program
Mendelssohn Quartet in D major for Strings, Op. 44, No. 1 (1838) Original performance April 13, 2018
Widmann Jagdquartett for Strings (2003) Original performance February 25, 2018
Verdi Quartet in E minor for Strings (1873) Original performance March 3, 2017

Calidore String Quartet

Photo: Sophie Zhai

The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct” and by the Los Angeles Times for its balance of “intellect and expression.” Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the quartet first made international headlines as winner of the $100,000 Grand-Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition. The quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and is an alum of CMS’s Bowers Program.

In the 2019-20 season, the Calidore String Quartet celebrated both its tenth anniversary and the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth by presenting cycles of his string quartets at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, and the Universities of Buffalo, Toronto, and Delaware.

As a passionate supporter of music education, the Calidore String Quartet is committed to mentoring and educating young musicians, students, and audiences. The Calidore serves as quartet-in-residence at the University of Delaware and the University of Toronto.

Using an amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents a reverence for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from the place of its founding, Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.”

Danish String Quartet

Photo: Caroline Bittencourt

Embodying the quintessential elements of a chamber music ensemble of the highest caliber, the Danish String Quartet has established a reputation for its integrated sound and technical and interpretive talents matched by an infectious joy for music-making and “rampaging energy” (The New Yorker). Since making their debut in 2002 at the Copenhagen Festival, the musical friends have demonstrated a passion for Scandinavian composers, who they frequently incorporate into adventurous contemporary programs, while also giving skilled and profound interpretations of the classical masters. The New York Times selected the quartet’s concerts as highlights of 2012 and 2015, praising “one of the most powerful renditions of Beethoven’s Opus 132 String Quartet that I’ve heard live or on a recording,” and “the adventurous young members of the Danish String Quartet play almost everything excitingly.”

The quartet’s recent debut recording on ECM Records features works of Danish composers Hans Abrahamsen and Per Nørgård and English composer Thomas Adés and received five stars from The Guardian, praised as “an exacting program requiring grace, grit and clarity and the Danish players sound terrific…It’s a sophisticated performance.” The recording debuted at number 16 on the Billboard Classical Chart and continues to earn international acclaim. In addition to its commitment to highlighting Scandinavian composers, the Danish String Quartet derives great pleasure from traditional Nordic folk music.

Orion String Quartet

Photo: Andreas Hafenscher

The Orion Quartet is one of the leading chamber music ensembles on the classical music scene today. Admired for their diverse programming that juxtaposes masterworks of the quartet literature with key works of the 20th and 21st centuries, the Orion provides a 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), violist Steven Tenenbom, and cellist Timothy Eddy—have worked closely with such illustrious musicians as Pablo Casals, Sir András Schiff, Rudolf Serkin, Isaac Stern, Pinchas Zukerman, Peter Serkin, members of the ensemble TASHI, the Beaux Arts Trio, and the Budapest, Végh, Galimir, and Guarneri String Quartets. The Orion String Quartet are season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

In the summer of 2019, the Orion String Quartet returned to the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival to perform three programs that included music by Schubert, Mozart, and Kreisler. This season, the quartet appears with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for two programs in Alice Tully Hall. The quartet also performs with Chamber Music Pittsburgh, at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of Met Live Arts’ celebration of the Guarneri Quartet.

Formed in 1987, the quartet takes its name from the Orion constellation as a metaphor for the personality each musician brings to the group in its collective pursuit of the highest musical ideals.

Performance Length: Approximately 1 hour, 20 minutes with intermission
Sunday, October 25, 2020 at 5:00pm EDT.