Mendelssohn: Quartet in F minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 2
Felix Mendelssohn: Quartet in F minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 2 (1823)
Allegro molto
Adagio
Intermezzo: Allegro moderato
Allegro molto vivace
Recorded live in Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday, July 15, 2025.
Video produced by Ibis Productions
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Michael Stephen Brown
Lun Li
Lawrence Dutton
Jonathan Swensen
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.
A native of Shanghai currently based in New York, violinist Lun Li won first prize in the 2021 Young Concert Artists Susan Wadsworth International Auditions. He has appeared on major stages around the world, including Helsinki Music Centre, Konzerthaus Berlin, Kulturpalast Dresden, Wiener Konzerthaus, and Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center. He recently made his solo recital debuts in Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Music Center in New York and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, as well as his concerto debut at Lincoln Center. An avid chamber musician, he has participated in the Marlboro, Music@Menlo, Verbier, and Angel Fire music festivals. He is a member of CMS’s Bowers Program and holds degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School; his mentors include Ida Kavafian, Catherine Cho, and Joseph Lin. Li plays the Stradivarius “Samazeuilh” 1735 violin, on generous loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.
Lawrence Dutton was the violist of the nine-time Grammy-winning Emerson String Quartet, which in 2023 performed its final concert after a storied 47-year career. He has also performed as guest artist with the Beaux Arts and Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trios and the Juilliard and Guarneri String Quartets. With the late Isaac Stern he collaborated on the International Chamber Music Encounters at Carnegie Hall and in Jerusalem. He began violin studies with Margaret Pardee and viola studies with Francis Tursi at the Eastman School. He holds degrees from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Lillian Fuchs. Currently, Dutton is Distinguished Professor of Viola and Chamber Music at Stony Brook University; Distinguished Artist at the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia; and Artistic Director of the Hoch Chamber Music Series in Bronxville, New York. He exclusively uses Thomastik Spirocore strings, and his viola is a Samuel Zygmuntowicz (Brooklyn, 2025).
Cellist Jonathan Swensen is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and joint first prize of the Naumburg International Cello Competition, and was featured as “One to Watch” in Gramophone. He made his concerto debut performing the Elgar Concerto with Portugal’s Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, and has performed with the Philharmonia Orchestra, Orquesta Ciudad de Granada, Copenhagen Philharmonic, Mobile Symphony, Greenville Symphony, and the Aarhus, Odense, and Iceland symphonies. He has captured first prizes at the Windsor International String Competition, Khachaturian International Cello Competition, and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. A graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Swensen continued his studies with Torleif Thedéen at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and Laurence Lesser at New England Conservatory, where he received his Artist Diploma. He is now an Artist in Residence at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel working with Gary Hoffman, and a member of CMS’s Bowers Program.