The Cavani String Quartet is an American string quartet based in Cleveland, Ohio. The quartet is named for the 19th century violin makers Giovanni and Vincenzo Cavani.
The quartet formed in 1984 and became the Quartet-in-Residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music in 1988. They have collaborated for many years in special performances with the poet Mwatabu Okantah.
The quartet has recorded music by Béla Bartók, Maurice Ravel, Antonín Dvořák, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Dan Welcher, Donald Erb, Ernest Chausson, Leo Brouwer, and James Primosch for the Albany, Azica, Gasparo, New World, and Pantheon labels. They won the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 1989. For their 20th anniversary, they commissioned the work Musings for String Quintet from composer Joseph Hallman. The premiere took place with Alisa Weilerstein, cellist, at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
The quartet has been partners with many organizations, including the Chamber Music Connection, led by Debbie Price. They also run many free concerts for growing and learning string players, many of whom are under age 18.
In June 2018, the Cleveland Institute of Music announced the severance of its affiliation with the Cavani String Quartet. [1]
Chamber music is a form of classical music that is composed for a small group of instruments—traditionally a group that could fit in a palace chamber or a large room. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers, with one performer to a part. However, by convention, it usually does not include solo instrument performances.
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates.
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Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist and String Masters co-founder Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded five albums. Playing a wide range of music genres including jazz, blues, tango, swing, funk, and pop, the group challenges the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet.
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