AIZURI QUARTET: C. Schumann, Brahms, Bartók

Aizuri Quartet

The Aizuri Quartet has established a unique position within today’s musical landscape, infusing all of its music-making with infectious energy, joy, and warmth, cultivating curiosity in listeners, and inviting audiences into the concert experience through its innovative programming, and the depth and fire of its performances.

Praised by The Washington Post for “astounding” and “captivating” performances that draw from its notable “meld of intellect, technique and emotions,” the Aizuri Quartet was named the recipient of the 2022 Cleveland Quartet Award by Chamber Music America, and was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2018 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition along with top prizes at the 2017 Osaka International Chamber Music Competition in Japan and the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition in London. The Quartet's debut album, Blueprinting, featuring new works written for the Aizuri Quartet by five American composers, was released by New Amsterdam Records to critical acclaim (“In a word, stunning” — I Care If You Listen), nominated for a 2019 GRAMMY Award, and named one of NPR Music’s Best Classical Albums of 2018. The Aizuri Quartet’s follow-up to Blueprinting will be released on Azica Records in 2023.

The Aizuri Quartet continues its innovative approach to programming into the 2022-23 season. Sunrise creatively juxtaposes Bartók’s Fourth quartet with Haydn’s Op. 76 No. 4 (“Sunrise”) alongside Tanya Tagaq’s Sivunittinni and a Clara Schumann song arranged by quartet cellist Karen Ouzounian. The quartet continues to perform the Aizuri Songbook; arrangements of popular songs, lieder, and song-inspired quartets, which the players sing and play simultaneously. Spring 2022 sees The Art of Translation, exploring the highly personal and expressive ways in which composers transform visual art and poetry into music and consider the dynamic nature of art, via Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and newer works by Lembit Beecher, Paul Wiancko, and Hannah Kendall.

With Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, the Aizuris perform Music and Migration, at the Civic Music Association in Des Moines, Armstrong Auditorium near Oklahoma City, and Okoboji Performing Arts in Northwest Iowa. Music and Migration, which includes newly commissioned works by George Lewis and Layale Chakher, is an examination of the players’ personal and family relationships to and experiences with migration, both as a physical journey and a state of mind.

The 2022-23 concert season sees notable debuts including presentations by Carnegie Hall, Dallas Chamber Music Society, Brevard Music Center’s new Parker Concert Hall, Tippet Rise Arts Center the Library of Congress, Ottawa ChamberFest, Texas Performing Arts, New Orleans Friends of Music, and the Celebrity Series of Boston. Additional appearances include returns to Ravinia Festival, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and the Women’s Music Club of Toronto and institutional engagements with Auburn University’s Gogue Performing Arts Center, the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Nevada Reno, University of Mississippi’s Ford Center, the Center for the Performing Arts at Penn State, Amherst College, Shenandoah Conservatory, and the University of Hartford.

In early 2022 the Aizuri Quartet was named fellows to the Artist Propulsion Lab, a project of WQXR, New York City’s Classical radio station. The Quartet’s fellowship includes live-broadcast performances, radio content, and the release of a new AizuriKids video, featuring music by Elizabeth Cotten, stop-motion animation by Lembit Beecher, and an interview with Rhiannon Giddens.

The 2021/22 season saw notable performances, including concerts with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ken David Masur, in which Aizuri Quartet performed John Adams’s Absolute Jest. With legendary indie rock band Wilco, Aizuri Quartet opened five concerts at the United Palace in Harlem and appeared with Wilco on The Tonight Show with Stephen Colbert. Also in 21/22, the quartet premiered David Ludwig’s Organistrum with Anthony McGill and Demarre McGill at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and unveiled new works by Paul Wiancko and Lembit Beecher at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC.

The Aizuris view the string quartet as a living art and springboard for community, collaboration, curiosity and experimentation. At the core of its music-making is a virtuosic ability to illuminate a vast range of musical styles through the Aizuri’s eclectic, engaging and thought-provoking programs. The Quartet has drawn praise both for bringing “a technical bravado and emotional power” to bold new commissions, and for its “flawless” (San Diego Union-Tribune) performances of the great works of the past. Exemplifying this intrepid spirit, the Aizuri Quartet curated and performed five adventurous programs as the 2017-2018 MetLiveArts String Quartet-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leading The New York Times to applaud Aizuri Quartet as “genuinely exciting,” “imaginative,” and “a quartet of expert collaborators.” For this series, the quartet collaborated with spoken word artist Denice Frohman and shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki, commissioned new works by Kinan Azmeh, Michi Wiancko and Wang Lu, as well as commissioned new arrangements of vocal music by Hildegard von Bingen and Carlo Gesualdo, which was paired with the music of Conlon Nancarrow, Haydn and Beethoven in a program focused on music created in periods of isolation.

The Aizuris believe in an integrative approach to music-making, in which teaching, performing, writing, arranging, curation, and the quartet’s role in the community are all connected. In 2020, the quartet launched AizuriKids, a free, online series of educational videos for children that uses the string quartet as a catalyst for creative learning and features themes such as astronomy, American history, and cooking. These vibrant, whimsical, and interactive videos are lovingly produced by the Aizuris and are paired with activity sheets to inspire further exploration.

The Aizuri Quartet is passionate about nurturing the next generation of artists, and is deeply grateful to have held several residencies that were instrumental in its development: from 2014-2016, the String Quartet-in-Residence at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, the 2015-2016 Ernst Stiefel String Quartet-in-Residence at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, and the resident ensemble of the 2014 Ravinia Festival’s Steans Music Institute.

Formed in 2012 and combining four distinctive musical personalities into a powerful collective, the Aizuri Quartet draws its name from “aizuri-e,” a style of predominantly blue Japanese woodblock printing that is noted for its vibrancy and incredible detail.

www.aizuriquartet.com

Carrie Bean Stute

Cellist Carrie Bean Stute is co-founder and co-artistic director of the Washington, DC-based Chiarina Chamber Players, a chamber music series and flexible ensemble that has won critical acclaim for its artistry and innovative programming. Carrie’s chamber music performances have been broadcast on Classical WETA’s Front Row Washington. In DC, she performs with the National Symphony Orchestra, has served as an adjunct professor of music at George Washington University, and is currently assistant principal cellist of “The President’s Own” Marine Chamber Orchestra, where she performs in such diverse settings as the White House, area public schools, and for events hosted by the United Nations and State Department.

A performer who seeks out the voices of today, she collaborates with a growing set of composers, including Reinaldo Moya, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Juhi Bansal, and Kennedy Center composer-in-residence Carlos Simon. Carrie authored a doctoral dissertation on the cello works of Pēteris Vasks and in 2021 performed as soloist in the North American premiere of his Cello Concerto No. 2. She took part in the Carnegie Hall workshop “New Voices, New Music” and has performed chamber music at such venues as the Phillips Collection, Zankel Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette, and an in-house educational residency at the 92nd Street Y.

Carrie holds degrees from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (Doctor of Musical Arts), Indiana University, and the Eastman School of Music. She was a fellow at the New World Symphony and Tanglewood Music Center. Forthcoming in 2024-25 are recordings of chamber music by Carlos Simon (with Domenic Salerni, Efi Hackmey, and Carl DuPont) and clarinet trios by Brahms and Beethoven (with Robert DiLutis and Rita Sloan).

Dana Kelley

Violist Dana Kelley is an active chamber musician and member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble. She is also a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra for the 2021-2022 season. Praised for her rich and beautiful tone, Dana has been a top prizewinner in the Sphinx Music Competition, the Irving M. Klein International String Competition, the M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition and the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competition. She also serves on the viola faculty of the Mannes School of Music at the New School.

Dana’s performance schedule has brought her to many prestigious venues and festivals, including multiple recitals at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Merkin Recital Hall at New York’s Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, the Ravinia Festival, and Bravo! Vail. Dana has collaborated with artists such as Ralph Kirshbaum, Nobuko Imai and Miriam Fried, pianists Leon Fleisher, Anne-Marie MacDermott and Misha Dichter, and cellist Astrid Schween of the Juilliard String Quartet.

Dana received an Artist Diploma in String Quartet Studies with the Argus String Quartet as the 2017-2019 Graduate Quartet in Residence at The Juilliard School. Dana was a 2014-2016 Fellow in Ensemble Connect - a performance and teaching program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and The Weill Music Institute. She received her Bachelor’s of Music from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, studying violin with Cornelia Heard and viola with Kathryn Plummer, and completed her Master’s of Music degree at the New England Conservatory as a student of Kim Kashkashian.