September 4, 2019
September 15 at Music Mountain: Dover Quartet

There are just two more weekends to catch the 90th anniversary season of Music Mountain, America’s longest running summer chamber music festival, this season. On Sunday, September 15 (3pm) the phenomenal Dover Quartet performs the penultimate concert of the summer season. The Quartet’s distinctive sound — its burnished warmth, incisive rhythms, and natural phrasing — has helped confirm its status as “the young American string quartet of the moment,” according to The New Yorker. The Quartet's program at Music Mountain features Mozart's Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546 (1788); Hindemith's String Quartet #3 in C Major, Op. 16 (1920); and Brahms' String Quartet #3 in B Flat Major, Op. 67 (1875). 

The Dover Quartet catapulted to international stardom following a stunning sweep of the 2013 Banff Competition. Recently named the Cleveland Quartet Award winner and awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Dover has become one of the most in-demand ensembles in the world. The Quartet’s rise from up-and-coming young ensemble to occupying a spot at the top of their field has been “practically meteoric” (Strings).

The Dover Quartet performs concerts around North America and Europe, including recent appearances at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center; a five-city U.S. tour with bassist-composer Edgar Meyer; a tour of the West Coast with mandolinist Avi Avital; and a performance with the superstar violinist Janine Jansen and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium.

The Quartet has two recordings on Cedille Records.  Its all-Mozart debut was a nod to the 1965 debut album of the Guarneri Quartet, and the late Michael Tree, the Guarneri’s founding violist, joined the Dover Quartet on the recording. The Quartet’s sophomore album, Voices of Defiance: 1943, 1944, 1945, released in October 2017, takes listeners on a powerful journey through works written during World War II by Viktor Ullmann, Dimitri Shostakovich, and Simon Laks.

The Quartet serves as the quartet-in-residence for the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. All four Quartet members are also consummate solo artists: first violinist Joel Link took first prize at the Menuhin Competition; violinist Bryan Lee and violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt have appeared as soloists with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Tokyo Philharmonic, respectively; and cellist Camden Shaw released a solo album debut on the Unipheye Music label. As Strad magazine observes, “With their exceptional interpretative maturity, tonal refinement, and taut ensemble,” the Dover Quartet is “pulling away from their peers.”

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