Chamber Music Perfection – The Calidore String Quartet Returns to Easton

The renowned Calidore String Quartet – gold prize winner at the 2012 International Chamber Music Competition – returns to Easton for a concert on Saturday evening, October 22nd. This Chesapeake Music Interlude Concert will take place at the Ebenezer Theater, 17 S. Washington Street, at 7:30 p.m.

Now based in New York City, the Calidore String Quartet – Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violins; Jeremy Berry, viola; and Estelle Choi, cello – first came together in 2010 at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. In the short span of just over a decade, the Quartet’s performances have consistently garnered praise and respect. A New York Times review cited the Quartet’s “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Los Angeles Times described the Quartet as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching for,” and praised its balance of “intellect and expression.” A Washington Post review stated that “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.”

In addition to the Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition, the Calidore String Quartet has won grand prizes in virtually all major US and international chamber music competitions, including the 2012 ARD Munich String Quartet Competition and the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which awarded the Quartet the $100,000 Grand Prize. In 2018, the Quartet received the highly prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant.

The Quartet’s members are passionate supporters of music education, especially the mentoring and educating of young musicians, students, and audiences. In 2021, the Quartet joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music, serving as directors of the Graduate String Quartet Residency program. There the Quartet selected the emerging Abeo Quartet as the inaugural two-year Graduate String Quartet Assistantship recipient. Chesapeake Music will sponsor the Abeo Quartet – the silver prize winner at the 2022 International Chesapeake Chamber Music Competition – in a concert on October 7, 2023.

The Calidore’s program on October 22, 2022 will feature three exciting and thoughtful string quartets by Beethoven (Op. 18, no. 6), Smetana (No. 1 “From My Life”), and Shostakovich (No. 8, Op. 110, “To the Memory of the Victims of Fascism and War”). Smetana’s lush and evocative string quartet, “From My Life” (1876), was written as an intimate confession – a tonal biography of his life, his loves, and his response to his deafness. Similarly, Beethoven’s Op.18 quartets (1798–1800), were written at the time when Beethoven was first experiencing the frustration of hearing loss. Together with Shostakovich’s explosive String Quartet No. 8, written in three days in 1960 as a final epitaph possibly before a planned suicide, these intimate musical self-portraits detail the inner lives of the composers and promise a deeply moving concert.

For more information and to purchase a ticket go to chesapeakemusic.org.

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~ Chesapeake Music

Based in Easton, Maryland, Chesapeake Music is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring renowned jazz and classical musicians to delight, engage and surprise today’s audiences, and educate, inspire, and develop tomorrow’s. They have been doing it for 37 years! To learn more about Chesapeake Music, visit their website at chesapeakemusic.org/.