...the sincerest form of flattery
| 1. | Introduction | 00:00:53 |
| 2. | Mozart: Quintet in C minor for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, K. 406 | 00:25:03 |
| 3. | Mendelssohn: Quartet No. 2 in A minor for Strings, Op. 13 | 00:32:33 |
PROGRAM
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) |
Quintet in C minor for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello, K. 406 (1787) Ani Kavafian, Violin; Alessio Bax, Piano |
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Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) |
Quartet No. 2 in A minor for Strings, Op. 13 (1827) Calidore String Quartet |
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Ani Kavafian
Alessio Bax
Calidore String Quartet
Violinist Ani Kavafian enjoys a prolific career as a soloist, chamber musician, and professor. She has performed with many of America’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony. In the 2019-20 season, she continued her longtime association as an artist of the Chamber Music Society with appearances in New York and on tour. Last summer she participated in several music festivals, including the Heifetz International Institute and the Sarasota Chamber Music, Bridgehampton, Meadowmount, Norfolk, and Angel Fire festivals. She and her sister, violinist and violist Ida Kavafian, have performed with the symphonies of Detroit, Colorado, Tucson, San Antonio, and Cincinnati, and have recorded the music of Mozart and Sarasate on the Nonesuch label. She is a Full Professor at Yale University and has appeared at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall numerous times with colleagues and students from Yale. She has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions award and has appeared at the White House on three occasions. Her recordings can be heard on the Nonesuch, RCA, Columbia, Arabesque, and Delos labels. Born in Istanbul of Armenian heritage, Kavafian studied violin in the US with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff. She received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School under Ivan Galamian. She plays the 1736 Muir McKenzie Stradivarius violin.
Alessio Bax catapulted to prominence with First Prize wins at both the Leeds and Hamamatsu International Piano Competitions. He has appeared with more than 150 orchestras, including the London, Royal, and St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestras, the Boston, Dallas, and Sydney Symphonies, and the NHK Symphony in Japan, collaborating with such eminent conductors as Marin Alsop, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Simon Rattle, Yuri Temirkanov, and Jaap van Zweden. He released his 11th Signum Classics album, Italian Inspirations, whose program was also the vehicle for his solo recital debut at New York’s 92nd Street Y as well as on tour. He and his regular piano duo partner, Lucille Chung, have given recitals at Lincoln Center and were featured with the St. Louis Symphony and Stéphane Denève. This season he makes his debut with the Milwaukee Symphony, and will return for the fourth time for two recitals at the historic Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Last summer he made return appearances at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival and at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival with the Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi conducting. At age 14, Bax graduated with top honors from the conservatory of Bari, his hometown in Italy, and after further studies in Europe, he moved to the United States in 1994. A Steinway artist, he lives in New York City with pianist Lucille Chung and their daughter, Mila. He is a former member of CMS’s Bowers Program and on the faculty at the New England Conservatory.
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.” Recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and a 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 currently a season artist at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.
In summer 2021, the Calidore made debuts at the Sarasota, La Jolla, and Saratoga Music Festivals as well as the Schubert Club of St. Paul, MN. Highlights of the 21-22 season include returns to Wigmore Hall, Alice Tully Hall, and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The Calidore will make its debut at the Library of Congress, the 92nd Street Y, Harvard University, Penn State University, and internationally in The Hague and Antwerp. The ensemble will premiere a new work by composer Huw Watkins commissioned by Wigmore Hall and will collaborate with the Emerson Quartet and pianists Jeffrey Kahane, Henry Kramer, and Gabriela Fahnenstiel.
The Calidore String Quartet’s second album for Signum Records, entitled BABEL, was released in 2020 and features worksby 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 recording for Signum is 2018’s Resilience including quartets by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janácek, and Golijov.
The Calidore has given world premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Hannah Lash, and Mark-Anthony Turnage. 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. An alum of CMS’s Bowers Program, 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. In 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.
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 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.”