The
Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep
reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Los Angeles
Times described the quartet as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly
deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime
searching” and praised its balance of “intellect and expression.” The Washington
Post has said that “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet
these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.”
Recipient
of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 2017 Lincoln Center
Emerging Artist Award, the Calidore
String 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 currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln
Center.
In summer 2021, the Calidore make debuts at the Sarasota, La Jolla and
Saratoga Music Festivals as well as the Schubert Club of St. Paul, MN. They
return once more as string quartet-in-residence at the Bellingham Festival (WA)
for a recital and as soloists in a series of classical
concerti with the Bellingham Festival Orchestra. Highlights of the 21-22 season
include returns to Wigmore Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Philadelphia Chamber Music
Society and Chamber Music Houston. The Calidore will make their debut at the
Library of Congress, Harvard University, Penn State University and
internationally in The Hague and Antwerp. They will premiere a new work by
composer Huw Watkins commissioned for them by Wigmore Hall and will collaborate
with pianist Jeffrey Kahane.
During
the 20/21 season heavily affected by the pandemic, the Calidore continued
to reach out to online audiences performing in empty concert halls or from
their home studio including the opening concert of the newly created series by
the Chamber Music Society in New York, a rare outdoor performance on the
Lincoln Center Plaza and streamed concerts from the Caramoor Festival and the
Music@Menlo Festival. In 2021, the Calidore premiered a new string quartet by
Hannah Lash commissioned by the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, the Amsterdam
Concertgebouw and Baltimore’s Shriver Hall. In February 2021, the Calidore
begin their recording of the complete Beethoven String Quartet cycle for Signum
Records.
Highlights of other recent seasons have included
performances in major venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia such as
Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Kennedy Center, Berlin Konzerthaus, Brussels
BOZAR, Cologne Philharmonie, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Hall and at significant
festivals including the BBC Proms, Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart,
Music@Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The Calidore
String Quartet’s second
Signum album, titled BABEL, was
released in October 2020, and features works by Schumann, Shostakovich and Caroline Shaw. The
Strad selected the album as the “Editor’s Choice” and praised it as “breathtaking…a
universally impressive disc.” The quartet’s other
recordings include 2018’s Resilience
including
“lively, intelligent performances of an attractive and thought-provoking
program” (Gramophone) of
quartets by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janácek and Golijov; quartets by
Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn recorded at the 2016 Music@Menlo festival; their
debut album of quartets by Mendelssohn and Haydn, and an album of music
commemorating the World War I centennial.
The
Calidore’s members were Young Artists in Residence on American Public Media’s Performance
Today, and their performances have been broadcast on NPR, the BBC, the
CBC, SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Korean Broadcasting System, Bayerischer Rundfunk
(Munich) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Hamburg), and were aired on German national
television as part of a documentary produced by ARD public broadcasting.
The Calidore has given world premieres of
works by Caroline Shaw, Hannah Lash, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Benjamin Dean
Taylor. Its collaborations with esteemed artists and ensembles include
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Marc-André Hamelin, Joshua Bell, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan,
Lawrence Power, Sharon Isbin, David Finckel and Wu Han among others. The
Calidore has collaborated and studied closely with the Emerson Quartet and
Quatuor Ébène, and has also studied with Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, Günter
Pichler, Guillaume Sutre, Paul Coletti and Ronald Leonard.
As a passionate supporter of music education, the Calidore
String Quartet is committed to mentoring and educating young musicians,
students, and audiences. In Fall 2021 the Calidore joined the faculty of the
University of Delaware School of Music and serve as directors of the newly
established Graduate String Quartet Residency. Formerly, they served as
artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto, University of Michigan and
Stony Brook University.
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
U.S. chamber music competitions, including the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake and
Yellow Springs competitions, and it captured top prizes at the 2012 ARD
International Music Competition in Munich and the International Chamber Music
Competition Hamburg. An amalgamation of “California” and “doré” (French for “golden”), the ensemble’s name represents its reverence
for the diversity of culture and the strong support it received from its
original home: Los Angeles, California, the “golden state.”
www.calidorestringquartet.com
