Juilliard String Quartet

The Juilliard String Quartet continues its vibrant tradition of music-making and education in the 2011/12 season, with Joseph Lin as its new first violinist and colleague on the faculty of The Juilliard School. The Quartet will appear worldwide in prestigious venues, including pairs of concerts in New York City and Philadelphia, at the Ravinia Festival, at Stanford University, abroad in Berlin, Munich, London, Tokyo, Osaka and Macau, China.

This international schedule is in keeping with recent seasons in which the Quartet has performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Konzerthaus Berlin, the International Beethoven Festival in Bonn, the Palacio Real in Madrid, at the Cité de la musique in Paris, the Miyazaki Festival in Japan, the Moscow International Performing Arts Centre, London’s Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Musica Viva Chamber Music Festival in Australia, at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem, and throughout the United States where they have appeared at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress, Jordan Hall in Boston, the Tanglewood Festival, Los Angeles’s Disney Hall and San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.

Since its inception in 1946, the Juilliard String Quartet has had the technical excellence, musicological knowledge, interpretive expressiveness and collegial communication to be able to perform virtually the complete repertory for string quartet in ways that thrill audiences as well as composers. The Quartet has consistently realized the credo stated by founders Robert Mann and William Schuman to “play new works as if they were established masterpieces, and established masterpieces as if they were new.” It is a matter, as Quartet violist Samuel Rhodes describes the JSQ, “of having iron-bound conviction, with flexibility.”

The Quartet was created by the great American composer, William Schuman, then president of The Juilliard School, and the Quartet’s original first violinist, Robert Mann. The ensemble’s purpose would be to perform contemporary works as well as the great classical repertory, and to teach at Juilliard. These have been, and remain, the cornerstones of the JSQ mission. The Quartet’s teaching activities, rooted in tradition and generational legacy, has included the coaching of string quartets and other types of ensembles, and the teaching of each player’s individual instruments (all four are members of the Juilliard School faculty, and three are the heads of their respective departments).

The JSQ is widely known as the “quintessential American string quartet.” The hallmarks of its distinctive JSQ sound – clarity of structure, beauty of sound, purity of line and an extraordinary unanimity of purpose – have been applied to virtually every era and genre in the literature, from Beethoven, Schubert and Bartók to Carter, Davidovsky, Babbitt and Wernick.

When the members of the Juilliard String Quartet played all of Arnold Schoenberg’s quartets for the composer, he told the musicians that they had played the works differently from the way he had conceived them. Concerned, the members of the Quartet asked what he would want them to do differently. Schoenberg responded, “You play my quartets with great conviction in your own way, and I would like you to continue to do that. The works will live on beautifully in your interpretations.”

During the course of its history, the JSQ has performed some 500 works, including the premieres of more than 60 pieces by American composers; works by the country’s finest jazz musicians are among them. The JSQ was the first ensemble to play all six Bartók quartets in the United States (giving the American premiere of the cycle at Tanglewood in 1948). The quartets of Schoenberg were rescued from obscurity by the ensemble’s performances.

The Quartet has carried the banner of The Juilliard School and of the United States throughout the world, contributing to the reputation of the school as one of the world’s foremost conservatories. The JSQ was Quartet in Residence at the Library of Congress for more than 40 years, and had a residency at Michigan State University for more than a decade. In addition to its annual five-day seminar at Juilliard, the members have taught master classes and seminars at Tanglewood, the Isaac Stern Seminars in Jerusalem, Carnegie Hall, Michigan State University, the Wuerzburg Hochschule, the Miyazaki Festival, and at many other institutions. Sharing its experience, the JSQ has been instrumental in the formation of numerous ensembles, among them the Alexander, American, Concord, Emerson, La Salle, New World, Mendelssohn, Tokyo, Brentano, Lark, St. Lawrence, Shanghai and Colorado String Quartets.

With more than 100 releases to its credit, the JSQ is one of the most widely recorded string quartets of our time. The ensemble’s long and rich recording history includes an association with Sony Classical, in its various incarnations, since 1949; classic JSQ recordings have now been digitally released on iTunes. The JSQ’s recordings of the complete Bartók quartets, the late Beethoven quartets, complete Schoenberg quartets, and Debussy and Ravel quartets have all received Grammy® Awards. Inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Academy for Recording Arts and Sciences (The Recording Academy®) in 1986 for its first recording of the complete Bartók quartets, the Juilliard String Quartet was awarded the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik Prize in 1993 for Lifetime Achievement in the recording industry. In 2011, the Juilliard String Quartet became the first classical music ensemble to be honored by The Recording Academy® with its Lifetime Achievement Award.