The Isidore String Quartet with Jeremy Denk

The Cleveland Museum of Art has partnered with the Cleveland Chamber Music Society to present the Isidore String Quartet, featuring pianist Jeremy Denk. Tickets must be purchased on the Cleveland Chamber Music Society’s website (opens in a new tab). 

Winners of a 2023 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the 14th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2022, the New York City–based Isidore String Quartet was formed in 2019 with a vision to revisit, rediscover, and reinvigorate the repertoire. The quartet is heavily influenced by the Juilliard String Quartet and the idea of “approaching the established as if it were brand new, and the new as if it were firmly established.”

In North America, the Isidore String Quartet has appeared on major series in Boston, New York, Berkeley, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Durham, Washington, Houston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver, and has collaborated with several eminent performers, including James Ehnes and Jeremy Denk (with whom the group is pleased to reunite with for the CMA performance). 

In Europe, the quartet has performed at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and in Bonn (Beethoven Haus), Stuttgart, Cologne, and Dresden, among many others. 

Both on stage and outside the concert hall, the Isidore Quartet is deeply invested in connecting with youth and elderly populations and with marginalized communities that otherwise have limited access to high-quality live music performance. The quartet approaches music as a “playground” and attempts to break down barriers to encourage collaboration and creativity. 

“A polished sonority and well-balanced, tightly synchronized ensemble with nearly faultless intonation. . . . It is heartening to know that chamber music is in good hands with such gifted young ensembles as the Isidore Quartet.” (Chicago Classical Review)

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists, proclaimed by The New York Times as “a pianist you want to hear no matter what he performs.” Denk is also a New York Times best-selling author, a recipient of both the MacArthur Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Denk is known for his interpretations of the music of American visionary Charles Ives and has performed frequently at Carnegie Hall, also working with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony in recent years. Meanwhile, he has performed multiple times at the BBC Proms and Klavierfestival Ruhr and appeared in such halls as the Köln Philharmonie, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and Boulez Saal in Berlin.

Program:

Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in B-flat Major, op. 76, no. 4, “Sunrise”

György Ligeti: String Quartet No. 2

Johannes Brahms: Quintet for Piano and Strings in F Minor, op. 34

The views expressed by performers during this event are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cleveland Museum of Art.