Welcome to Our 2011-2012 Season

Dear Chamber Music Lovers:

We want to express our excitement about the season now concluded and the one to begin this fall. For 2011-2012, our 83rd year, we offer fresh and exciting performances from both established and critically acclaimed emerging chamber music ensembles.

These include the most long-lived and highly-regarded of all American chamber players, the Juilliard String Quartet. The Juilliard was cited by the 2011 Grammy Awards as “one of the world’s great cultural treasures.” This will be Cincinnati’s first opportunity to hear the quartet’s new first violinist, Joseph Lin.

Program Detail

The season begins on September 20 with a performance by the Juilliard String Quartet in a compelling program that includes Mozart, Stravinsky and Janacek.

On October 18, in collaboration with the Constella Festival, the twice-Grammy nominated St. Lawrence String Quartet. One of the best known American string quartets and the resident string quartet at Stanford University, it offers an exciting program: Mozart, Korngold and John Adams’ “String Quartet,” expressly written for the St. Lawrence, who premiered it in 2009.

The season’s first half ends December 6 with the highly-lauded Afiara String Quartet. It completed a two year Juilliard graduate residency this May and will perform Beethoven’s Op.95 String Quartet in F minor (“Serioso”), and quartets by Neilsen and Sibelius. The Afiara received the Szekely Prize for best Beethoven performance at the 2010 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Its debut CD features Mendelssohn and Schubert quartets, plus the Mendelssohn Octet with the Alexander String Quartet.

Our season’s second half features the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, one of the most highly regarded such ensembles, as well as two superb piano trios:

  • The Morgenstern Trio are winners of the elite piano trio award, the Kalichstein, Laredo, Robinson award (of which Chamber Music Cincinnati is an inaugural sponsor).
  • The Kaplan Weiss Newman Trio, praised by both the New York Times and Washington post, is comprised of three award winning soloists. A selection from the trio’s appearance on public radio’s nationally broadcast St. Paul Sunday was chosen for the show’s “Best of the Year” CD.

Each will explore works of the masters (Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Faure), plus works by Steven Stucky (2005), Leonard Bernstein (1937) and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Higdon, respectively. The latter’s work will also be featured next season in a CSO performance with Eighth Blackbird.

You would expect us to predict this as one of our best seasons ever – and we do. For a complete list of dates, programs, venues and times, click here. We look forward to seeing you this fall.

Kayla Springer
President

Reuel Ash
Program Committee Chair