The Wigmore Hall is a concert hall at 36 Wigmore Street, in west London. It was designed by Thomas Edward Collcutt and opened in 1901 as the Bechstein Hall; it is considered to have particularly good acoustics. It specialises in performances of chamber music, early music, vocal music and song recitals, and hosts over five hundred concerts each year, as well as a weekly concert broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
The Silesian String Quartet is a string quartet founded in 1978 by the graduates of the Karol Szymanowski Academy of Music in Katowice, Poland. Its current members are:
Wu Man is a Chinese pipa player and composer. Trained in Pudong-style pipa performance at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, she is known for playing in a broad range of musical styles and introducing the pipa and its Chinese heritage into Western genres. She has performed and recorded extensively with Kronos Quartet and Silk Road Ensemble, and has premiered works by Philip Glass, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Bright Sheng, Tan Dun, Zhao Jiping, and Zhou Long, among many others. She has recorded and appeared on over 40 albums, five of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards. In 2013, she was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America, becoming the first performer of a non-Western instrument to receive this award. She also received The United States Artists Award in 2008.
Vijay Iyer is an American composer, pianist, bandleader, producer and writer based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he received a lifetime appointment as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of Music and the Department of African and African American Studies.
The Pacifica Quartet is a professional string quartet based in Bloomington, Indiana. Its members are: Simin Ganatra, first violin; Austin Hartman, second violin; Mark Holloway, viola; and Brandon Vamos, cello. Formed in 1994 by Ganatra and Vamos with violinist Sibbi Bernhardsson and violist Kathryn Lockwood, the group won prizes in competitions such as the 1996 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, the 1997 Concert Artists Guild Competition, and the 1998 Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. In 2001, violist Masumi Per Rostad replaced Lockwood. The group subsequently received Chamber Music America's prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award in 2002, the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2006, and was named "Ensemble of the Year" by Musical America in 2009. In 2017, violinist Austin Hartman replaced Bernhardsson and violist Guy Ben-Ziony replaced Rostad.
The Ariel String Quartet is a string quartet based in the United States. It was formed in Israel in about 2000 by students at the Jerusalem Academy Middle School of Music and Dance, when its members were teenagers.
Gabriela Lena Frank is an American pianist and composer of contemporary classical music.
Tyzen Hsiao was a Taiwanese composer of the neo-Romantic school. Many of his vocal works set poems written in Taiwanese Hokkien, the mother tongue of the majority of the island's residents at the time. His compositions stand as a musical manifestation of the Taiwanese literature movement that revitalized the island's literary and performing arts in the 1970s and 1980s. Hsiao's career in music included additional success as a pianist and conductor.
The Alexander String Quartet is a string quartet based in San Francisco. Formed in New York in 1981, the Alexander String Quartet has since 1989 been Ensemble in Residence of San Francisco Performances.
Paul Watkins is a Welsh classical cellist and conductor. His brother is the composer Huw Watkins. Watkins studied cello with William Pleeth, Melissa Phelps and Johannes Goritzki. In 1988, he won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in the string section. From 1990 to 1997, he was principal cellist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
The Henschel Quartet is a German string quartet comprising the Henschel siblings; Christoph and Markus (violinists), Monika (viola) and Mathias Beyer-Karlshøj (cellist), who joined them in 1994. Brother Markus left the quartet in 2010, and was succeeded by Daniel Bell in 2012. In 2016–2018 Catalin Desaga took the place of the second violin. Today the Quartet consists of following members: Christoph Henschel and Teresa La Cour (violinists), Monika Henschel (viola) and Mathias Beyer-Karlshøj (cello).
Graham Waterhouse is an English composer and cellist who specializes in chamber music. He has composed a cello concerto, Three Pieces for Solo Cello and Variations for Cello Solo for his own instrument, and string quartets and compositions that juxtapose a quartet with a solo instrument, including Piccolo Quintet, Bassoon Quintet and the piano quintet Rhapsodie Macabre. He has set poetry for speaking voice and cello, such as Der Handschuh, and has written song cycles. His compositions reflect the individual capacity and character of players and instruments, from the piccolo to the contrabassoon.
Wen-Pin Hope Lee is a Hoklo Taiwanese contemporary music composer and Professor. His works comprise a variety of genres, including symphonies, theatre, dance, solo works, chamber music, computer music, and multimedia performance art. In 2004 he began his Taiwan Series of compositions: a body of work inspired by Taiwanese culture, including Indigenous peoples and Hakka melodies, sung texts in Taiwanese, and the ambient sounds of Taiwan locales. Lee is the winner of the 2006 Golden Melody Award for Best Composer of Traditional and Artistic Music and a nominee for the 2007 Golden Melody Award for his recording of his five-act theatre dance piece Hsiahai City God through Water of Mengjia. In 2013, Lee won an award for his collaborative work with Radio Taiwan International on “Happiness on March” at 48th Golden Bell Awards.
Shih-Hui Chen is a Taiwanese composer who lives and works in the United States.
The Cuarteto Casals is a Spanish string quartet based at l'Auditori in Barcelona, where all four members reside and teach at the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya.
Ilan Rechtman is an Israeli pianist, composer and music director.
The Jasper String Quartet is a professional string quartet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Currently the Ensemble in Residence at Temple University's Center for Gifted Young Musicians, the quartet was previously the Quartet in Residence at Oberlin Conservatory. Formed in 2004 while its members were in school at Oberlin Conservatory, the quartet completed string quartet master's programs at Rice University (2006–2008) and Yale University (2008–2010). The group's primary mentors are James Dunham, Norman Fischer and the Tokyo String Quartet. In 2010, they joined the roster of Astral Artists.
The Calidore String Quartet is an internationally performing classical music string quartet based in New York City. The Calidore is composed of violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry and cellist Estelle Choi.
The Aizuri Quartet is an American string quartet formed in 2012. Known for its performance of new music as well as the traditional repertoire, it has served as the quartet-in-residence at a number of cultural organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017–2018, the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, 2015–2016, and the Curtis Institute, 2014–2016. Its name is taken from aizuri-e, a Japanese style of woodblock printing that is mostly blue.
The ConTempo Quartet is a string quartet founded in Bucharest in 1995 and long-resident in Galway, Ireland, which has held national and regional appointments in Ireland, and performed in a wide range of events in Romania, Spain, Ireland and elsewhere.
