Calidore String Quartet To Tour Complete Beethoven String Quartet Cycle

The Calidore String Quartet celebrates its tenth anniversary and the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven's birth by performing the complete Beethoven String Quartets at the University of Buffalo, University of Toronto and University of Delaware in concerts throughout the 2019-20 season. The Calidore will also take part in a complete cycle of Beethoven String Quartets at the Colburn School in Los Angeles where the quartet was founded.

For Colburn's Beethoven 250 celebration, the Calidore String Quartet will coach student musicians in the days leading up to a presentation of six concerts in three days (October 16-18) during which the Calidore will perform nine of the Beethoven string quartets alongside faculty and students who will perform the rest.

On September 17th at 7:00 pm, the Calidore String Quartet will preview their Beethoven cycle with a performance at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space for WQXR's Classical Up Close, to be broadcast and streamed live on air and online.

The Calidore String Quartet has been captivated by Beethoven's quartets since their founding in 2010 at the Colburn School and has incorporated the quartets into recital programming throughout their decade together. "The process of absorbing and understanding Beethoven's entire string quartet cycle mirrors the challenges that come with the evolution and growth of a string quartet," says Calidore String Quartet cellist Estelle Choi. "Just as Beethoven transformed the reserved poise and order of the classical style and infused it with emotional abandon and fantasy, a quartet must also take the rules they have learned and liberate themselves from expectations. Boundaries must be broken. Every vulnerable human emotion is fair game. It is only fitting to usher in our 10th Anniversary as the Calidore String Quartet with reverence to the past and an openness to the future, just as Beethoven wondrously accomplished in his groundbreaking sixteen string quartets."

"The sixteen quartets comprise over eight hours of music filled with the most technically intricate and emotionally demanding writing ever conceived," writes Calidore second violinist Ryan Meehan. "For this reason, tackling this cycle is one of the greatest challenges a string quartet can undertake."

Technical challenges aren't the only reason Beethoven's quartets are a crucible for any string quartet. "The creative genius that lives in those black lines and dots of music beckons string quartet players to discover the depths of Beethoven's intricate soul," remarks Choi. "We surrender to Beethoven's demands and toil over the technical challenges, all to find the human behind the music. The more we learn about him, the more we learn about ourselves."

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." The Calidore made international headlines when they won the $100,000 Grand-Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition and has since been the recipient of a 2018 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. The quartet was the first North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, was a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and just completed its third year in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Bowers Program (formerly CMS Two).

In addition to its performance of the complete Beethoven String Quartets in the 2019-20 season, the Calidore will premiere a new work by composer Anna Clyne inspired by Beethoven's Grosse Fuge and commissioned by Music Accord in performances at Lincoln Center, Princeton, Penn State, Caramoor, San Francisco Performances and Boston's Celebrity Series. The quartet will also make its debut at Strathmore and with the Kansas City Friends of Chamber Music. In Europe, the Calidore perform Beethoven in Antwerp, Dresden and at the Rheingau Festival and will appear on important series in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Spain and Switzerland. The Quartet will continue to collaborate with artists such as the pianists Marc-Andre Hamelin, Pavel Kolesnikov, Yeol Eum Son, Sophiko Simisive and Henry Kramer, violists Lawrence Power and Matthew Lipman, cellist Clive Greensmith, bassist Xavier Foley, guitarist Sharon Isbin, and oboist Cristina Gómez Godoy.

Resilience, the Calidore String Quartet's October 2018 release on Signum Records includes a "cleverly devised selection of quartets" (Strad) by Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Janáček and Golijov. The quartet's other recordings include two albums recorded live in concert at the Music@Menlo Festival; their debut album of quartets by Mendelssohn and Haydn and an album on Editions Hortus, with music commemorating the World War I centennial.

The Calidore String Quartet was founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010. Within two years the quartet won grand prizes in the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs competitions. 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 its home of origin, Los Angeles, California, the "golden state."

For a complete listing of their 2019-20 engagements, please visit the Calidore String Quartet's website.