Prelude to Modernism
| 1. | Introduction | 00:00:56 |
| 2. | Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune for Ensemble (arr. Schoenberg) | 00:15:41 |
| 3. | Ysaÿe: Rêve d’enfant> for Violin and Piano, Op. 14 | 00:05:31 |
| 4. | Grieg: Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 27 | 00:36:21 |
PROGRAM
|
Claude Debussy (1862–1918) |
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune for Ensemble (arr. Schoenberg) (1894) Tara Helen O'Connor, Flute; Stephen Taylor, Oboe; Jose Franch-Ballester, Clarinet; Daniel Ching, Violin I; William Fedkenheuer, Violin II; John Largess, Viola; Joshua Gindele, Cello; Scott Pingel, Double Bass; Michael Stephen Brown, Harmonium; Lucille Chung, Piano; Ian Rosenbaum, Percussion |
|
Eugène Ysaÿe (1859–1931) |
Rêve d’enfant for Violin and Piano, Op. 14 (1901) Arnaud Sussmann, Violin; Anne-Marie McDermott, Piano |
|
Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) |
Quartet in G minor for Strings, Op. 27 (1878) Erik Schumann, Violin I; Ken Schumann, Violin II; Liisa Randalu, Viola; Mark Schumann, Cello |
| Title | Date |
|---|---|
| Streaming live | {{ViewModel.StreamingOn.date}}, {{ViewModel.StreamingOn.time}} |
| Off-sale on | {{ViewModel.OffSaleDate.date}}, {{ViewModel.OffSaleDate.time}} |
| Available on-demand until | {{ViewModel.AvailableUntil.date}}, {{ViewModel.AvailableUntil.time}} |
{{ViewModel.BuySubscription.prompt}}
Anne-Marie McDermott
Tara Helen O'Connor
Stephen Taylor
Jose Franch-Ballester
Michael Stephen Brown
Ian Rosenbaum
Arnaud Sussmann
Miró Quartet
Schumann Quartet
One of the most dazzling American pianists of her generation, Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is an insightful interpreter of Baroque and Classical masterpieces, 20th-century modernism, and music by influential contemporary composers. McDermott has soloed with the New York Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the National Symphony Orchestra. She continues her tenure as Music and Artistic Director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival through 2026. She is the Artistic Director of the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival and Artistic Director of the McKnight Center’s Chamber Music Festival. McDermott is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mexico City’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería under Carlos Miguel Prieto. Her recordings also include the complete piano sonatas of Prokofiev, solo works by Chopin, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas, and Gershwin’s works for piano and orchestra. She received a 2024 honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music.
Tara Helen O’Connor, recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and a two-time Grammy nominee, was the first wind player to participate in CMS’s Bowers Program. A regular performer at major music festivals around the country, she is also the Co-Artistic Director of the Music from Angel Fire Festival in New Mexico, the Artistic Director of the Essex Winter Series, a member of the woodwind quintet Windscape, and a founding member of the Naumburg Award–winning New Millennium Ensemble. She has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, EMI Classics, Koch International, CMS Studio Recordings, and Bridge Records, and can be heard on numerous film and television soundtracks. She has premiered hundreds of new works and has collaborated with the Orion, St. Lawrence, and Emerson String Quartets. A Wm. S. Haynes flute artist, O’Connor is on faculty at Yale School of Music. Additionally, she teaches at Bard College and the Manhattan School of Music.
Stephen Taylor is solo oboist with the New York Woodwind Quintet, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, the American Composers Orchestra, and the New England Bach Festival Orchestra, and is co-principal oboist of Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Among his more than 300 recordings are Bach arias with Kathleen Battle and Itzhak Perlman, and Elliott Carter’s Oboe Quartet, for which he received a Grammy nomination. He has performed and recorded many of Carter’s works, giving several world and US premieres. He was awarded a performer’s grant from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University and has collaborated with the Vermeer, Shanghai, Orion, American, and Artis-Vienna String Quartets, among others. Taylor is on the faculties of the Manhattan, Juilliard and Yale schools of music. He plays rare James Caldwell model Lorée oboes, and spends as much time as possible with his old wooden boats in Maine.
Clarinetist Jose Franch-Ballester is a captivating performer of “poetic eloquence” (The New York Sun) and “technical wizardry” (The New York Times). He plays regularly at the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival, the Skaneateles Festival, Camerata Pacifica, and Music from Angel Fire. He has also appeared at the Usedomer Musikfestival in Germany, the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, the Cartagena Festival Internacional de Música in Colombia, and the Young Concert Artists Festival in Tokyo, Japan. As a soloist, he has appeared with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, the BBC Concert Orchestra, the Santa Barbara Orchestra, and numerous Spanish orchestras. Winner of the 2004 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, he was presented in debut recitals in New York and in Washington, DC at the Kennedy Center. In 2008, he won a coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant. He was awarded the Cannes Midem Prize, which aims to introduce artists to the classical recording industry. With the Chamber Music Society, he has recorded Bartók’s Contrasts on the Deutsche Grammophon label. Born in Moncofa, Spain into a family of clarinetists and Zarzuela singers, Mr. Franch-Ballester graduated from the Joaquin Rodrigo Music Conservatory. He earned a bachelor’s degree from The Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Donald Montanaro and Pamela Frank. He is a former member of CMS’s Bowers Program.
Michael Stephen Brown is a composer and pianist hailed by the New York Times as “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.” The 2026 Andrew Wolf Award Winner and a recent fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo, he is also a recipient of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Artist Award and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Brown performs internationally and receives commissions from orchestras, soloists, and festivals around the world. Recent highlights include a recital at Alice Tully Hall for CMS, and collaborations with cellist Nicholas Canellakis and violinists Pinchas Zukerman, Kristin Lee, and Arnaud Sussmann. He is currently composing The Carnival of Endangered Wonders, a CMS-led project co-presented by a consortium of US presenters. His first album devoted entirely to his music, Twelve Blocks, will be released in February 2026. Brown is also composing the score for Angeline Gragasin’s upcoming film Look But Don’t Touch and lives in New York City with his two 19th-century Steinways, Octavia and Daria.
Praised for his “spectacular performances” (Wall Street Journal), and his “unfailing virtuosity” (Chicago Tribune), percussionist Ian Rosenbaum has developed a musical breadth far beyond his years. As a passionate advocate for contemporary music, Mr. Rosenbaum has premiered dozens of new chamber and solo works, and his recordings have been nominated for eight Grammy awards. In 2012, Mr. Rosenbaum joined the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two) as only the second percussionist selected in the program’s history. Mr. Rosenbaum is a founding member of Sandbox Percussion, and is on faculty at the Peabody Institute, the Mannes School of Music, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Winner of a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant, Arnaud Sussmann has recently appeared as soloist with the Vancouver Symphony and the New World Symphony. As a chamber musician, he has performed at the Tel Aviv Museum, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Dresden Music Festival, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. He has also given concerts at the Moritzburg, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, La Jolla SummerFest, Mainly Mozart, Seattle Chamber Music, Chamber Music Northwest, and Moab Music festivals. An alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, Sussmann is Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach and Co-Director of Music@Menlo’s International Program, and teaches at Stony Brook University. In September 2022, he was named Founding Artistic Director of the Boscobel Chamber Music Festival. Mr. Sussmann plays a 1731 Stradivarius violin on loan from a private owner.
The Miró Quartet is one of America’s most celebrated string quartets, praised as “furiously committed” by The New Yorker and recognized for its “exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Marking its 30th anniversary in 2025, the quartet has performed on the world’s most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, Texas, and thriving on the area’s storied music scene, the quartet takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music. They were members of CMS Two (now the Bowers Program) from 2001 to 2003. Since 2003, they have served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. They were members of CMS Two (now the Bowers Program) from 2001 to 2003.
The Miró Quartet’s newest album, an acclaimed recording of Ginastera’s complete string quartets, was released on Pentatone in July 2025. Among its many previous recordings for a variety of global labels, the quartet was nominated for a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for its album Home (Pentatone, 2024) featuring two new commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, as well as works by George Walker and Samuel Barber. It was also nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award for its album House of Belonging, created in collaboration with Austin-based choral group Conspirare.
The quartet’s recent and upcoming projects include Here on Earth with pianist Lara Downes, the premiere of a new version of Kevin Puts’s Credo, and collaborations with composers Steven Banks, Tamar-Kali, and Gabriel Kahane, as well as soprano Karen Slack and the Isadore Quartet.
The Miró Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works—with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy—are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.
The Schumann Quartet has reached a stage where anything is possible, because it has dispensed with certainties. This also has consequences for audiences, which from one concert to the next have to be prepared for all eventualities: “A work really develops only in a live performance,” the quartet says. “That is 'the real thing', because we ourselves never know what will happen. On the stage, all imitation disappears, and you automatically become honest with yourself. Then you can create a bond with the audience – communicate with it in music.” This live situation will gain an added energy in the near future: Albrecht Mayer, Menahem Pressler, Kit Armstrong, Anna Vinnitskaya and Anna Lucia Richter are among the quartet's current partners.
A special highlight of the 21/22 season was the four concerts at Wigmore Hall London, where the quartet was the Quartet in Residence that season. Furthermore, the quartet will be back on tour in the USA after an enforced break. It will be a guest at the String Quartet Biennale Amsterdam, the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival and the MDR Musiksommer, as well as in Berlin, Schwetzingen, Frankfurt, Cologne and Dortmund. In addition, the quartet will be able to present two special programs in Madrid and Bilbao together with mezzo-soprano Anna-Lucia Richter.
Its album “Intermezzo” (2018 | Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Schumann und Reimann with Anna-Lucia Richter) has been hailed enthusiastically both at home and abroad and received the award “Opus Klassik“ in the category quintet. It is celebrated as a worthy successor to its award-winning “Landscapes” album, in which in which the quartet traces its own roots by combining works of Haydn, Bartók, Takemitsu and Pärt. Among other prices, the latter received the “Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik”, five Diapasons and was selected as Editor's Choice by the BBC Music Magazine. For its previous CD “Mozart Ives Verdi”, the Schumann Quartet was accorded the 2016 Newcomer Award at the BBC Music Magazine Awards in London. In 2020 the quartet has expanded its discography with "Fragment" and his examination of one of the masters of the string quartet: Franz Schubert.
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.