Emerald City Music brings you not one, but two incredible string quartets on the same stage: the Abeo Quartet and the Calidore Quartet for our Quartet in Spotlight annual series. The collaboration of these two ensembles celebrates a very meaningful relationship and built legacy: the multi-award winning Calidore have served as mentors and teachers to the emerging Abeo Quartet at the University of Delaware. Each ensemble will perform a work on their own in the spotlight. The Calidore performs Mozart’s Quartet No. 16, a tuneful work that redefined the possibility of musical form and bearing a dedication to his contemporary Joseph Haydn. The Abeo performs Shostakovich’s eleventh quartet, a cryptic suite of seven movements that bitterly elegizes the passing of Vasili Shrinsky, a close friend of Shostakovich and a member of the Beethoven Quartet to whom he dedicated four quartets. The Calidore and Abeo Quartets finally join together to perform arguably among the most resplendent pieces of music ever written: Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E-flat Major. Written at the mere age of sixteen, Mendelssohn’s prodigious symphonic vision met his affection late in life as he called it: “my favorite of all of my compositions.”
The Calidore String Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of a vast chamber music repertory, from the cycles of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to works of celebrated contemporary voices like György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann, and Caroline Shaw. For more than a decade, the Calidore has enjoyed performances and residencies in the world’s major venues and festivals, released multiple critically acclaimed recordings, and won numerous awards. The Los Angeles Times described the musicians as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching.” The New York Times noted the Quartet’s “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct,” and the Washington Post wrote that “four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one”.
The New York City based Calidore String Quartet has appeared in venues throughout North America, Europe, and Asia including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, London’s Wigmore Hall, Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Brussels’ BOZAR, Cologne Philharmonie, Seoul’s Kumho Arts Hall, and at major festivals such as the BBC Proms, Verbier, Ravinia, Mostly Mozart, Music@Menlo, Rheingau, East Neuk, and Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Always seeking new commissioning opportunities, the Quartet has given world premieres of works by Caroline Shaw, Anna Clyne, Han Lash, Huw Watkins and Mark-Anthony Turnage and collaborated with artists such as Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Marc-André Hamelin, Joshua Bell, Emerson String Quartet, Jeffrey Kahane, David Shifrin, Inon Barnatan, Lawrence Power, Sharon Isbin, David Finckel and Wu Han.
Highlights of the 23-24 season include return appearances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and People’s Symphony in New York as well as concerts in Seattle, Palm Beach, Ottawa, Toronto, Kalamazoo and a European tour of United Kingdom, Estonia and Germany. The Calidore team up with pianist and composer Gabriela Montero for a world premiere of her new piano quintet at the Gilmore Piano Festival (MI) and also enjoy collaborations with the violist Matthew Lipman and harpist Bridget Kibbey, with whom they will premiere a new work by Sebastian Currier. Last season, the Calidore joined the Emerson String Quartet on their farewell tour in the Mendelssohn Octet and collaborated with clarinetist Anthony McGill and bassist Xavier Foley. The Quartet members also performed at Carnegie Hall alongside Anne-Sophie Mutter in a memorial concert honoring André Previn, featuring his compositions.
In their most ambitious recording project to date, the Calidore is set to release the complete Beethoven’s String Quartets for Signum Records in the 24/25 season. Volume I, containing the late quartets, was released in 2023 to great critical acclaim. BBC Music Magazine said the Calidore’s performances “penetrate right to the heart of the music” and “can stand comparison with the best.” Their previous recordings on Signum include titles Babel with music by Schumann, Shaw and Shostakovich, and Resilience with works by Prokofiev, Janáček, Golijov and Mendelssohn.
The Calidore String Quartet was founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010. Within two years, the quartet won grand prizes in virtually all the major US chamber music competitions, including the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs competitions, and it captured top prizes at the 2012 ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the International Chamber Music Competition Hamburg. The Quartet first made international headlines as the winner of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition and it was the first and only North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. The Calidore was also named a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and in 2018, it was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant, having won the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award a year prior. The Calidore is currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York.
In 2021 the Calidore members joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music and serve as artistic directors of the newly established Graduate String Quartet Fellowship Residency and the University of Delaware Chamber Music Series. Prior to taking this position, they served as artist-in residence at the University of Toronto, University of Michigan and Stony Brook University. Now dedicated teachers and passionate supporters of music education themselves, the Calidore is grateful to have been mentored by the Emerson Quartet, Quatuor Ébène, Andre Roy, Arnold Steinhardt, David Finckel, Günter Pichler, Guillaume Sutre, Paul Coletti, and Ronald Leonard.
The Calidore String Quartet plays the following instruments:
Jeffrey Myers plays a violin by Francesco Rugeri c.1680, owned by a private benefactor on loan through the Leonhard Fellowship and plays a bow by Francois Tourte.
Ryan Meehan plays a violin by Vincenzo Panormo c.1775 and a bow by Joseph Henry.
Jeremy Berry plays a viola by Giovanni Battista Ceruti c.1811, owned by a private benefactor and a 1903 Umberto Muschietti viola and plays a bow by Pierre Simon.
Estelle Choi plays a cello by Charles Jacquot c.1830
The Abeo Quartet, formed at Juilliard in 2018, was the inaugural Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the University of Delaware under the mentorship of the Calidore String Quartet from 2021-2023. Abeo's recent accomplishments include Third Prize at the 2023 Bad Tölz International String Quartet Competition, making the semi-finals at the 2023 Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition and being among ten quartets invited to participate in the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022. The quartet was also a First Prize and Audience Favorite Prize winner in the Yellow Springs Chamber Music Competition for Emerging Professional Ensembles and Silver Medal winner of the Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition, both in 2022. Additionally, Abeo was a finalist in the 2021 Young Concert Artists International Competition and the silver medal winner of the 2019 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.
Members of the quartet are violinists Njioma Grevious and Rebecca Benjamin, violist James Kang and newest member, cellist Macintyre Taback.
Recent highlights have included performances at Music@Menlo, the Schneider Concert Series, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, and collaborations with members of the Calidore and Dover string quartets.
In March 2024, Abeo returned to perform at the Kennedy Center, having been featured there in 2019 with distinguished pianist Joseph Kalichstein at the Reach Opening Festival. The 2023-2024 season has also brought a yearlong residency for Abeo as the Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY., with performances coming up in April and June that will include outreach to young listeners and others who are unable to attend live concerts. Abeo will also perform this spring at Emerald City Music in Seattle alongside the Calidore String Quartet.
Past Abeo highlights include performances at Alice Tully Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s masterclass series with the Danish String Quartet, and on WQXR’s Midday Masterpieces. Abeo was invited to perform in Norway’s 2019 Vertavo Festival, performing seven Haydn string quartets and was in residence at the Glenstone Museum, debuting "Moonshot" by Alistair Coleman. The quartet has studied and performed at Music@Menlo, with the Emerson Quartet at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and with the Brentano String Quartet at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. At the Montreal International String Quartet Academy, Abeo was coached by members of Quatuor Ébéne, Alban Berg, Takács, Artemis, Cecilia and Meta4 String Quartets.
During their time at Juilliard, Abeo studied regularly in the Honors Chamber Music Program under the tutelage of The Juilliard String Quartet with Joseph Lin, Astrid Schween and Roger Tapping. The quartet chose the name Abeo / ah - bey - oh / — an expression of joy in a Nigerian dialect — to reflect their love for playing chamber music and sharing it with others.
