Last summer, audiences got to experience the Festival debut of one of today’s most in-demand ensembles: the Calidore String Quartet, which Gramophone has called “the epitome of confidence and finesse” and the Los Angeles Times has praised for its “astonishingly life-affirming music-making.”
This season, the Calidore appears on two programs, making their highly anticipated return on Sunday July 27, and Monday, July 28, with performances of a Shostakovich tour-de-force—the composer’s dark-edged String Quartet No. 8—and, alongside pianist Orion Weiss, a work of a very different nature: Schumann’s exuberant Piano Quintet, known as classical music’s first great piano quintet. On July 28, at noon, the Calidore gives a wonderfully wide-ranging recital that includes Korngold’s post-Romantic String Quartet in D Major, which draws on music from the composer’s brilliant film scores; Haydn’s popular and utterly delightful String Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5; and Pulitzer Prize– and Grammy Award–winning composer Caroline Shaw’s enthralling, Haydn-inspired Entr’acte.
The Calidore’s members—violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi—met at the Colburn School, in Los Angeles, and came together to form their quartet—whose name is a combination of California and doré (the French word for golden)—in 2010. By 2012, the ensemble had won grand prizes at almost all the major chamber music competitions in the United States, including the Coleman and Fischoff competitions, as well as top prizes at Hamburg’s International Chamber Music Competition and Munich’s ARD International Music Competition. They’re also a former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and they’ve received a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship, an Avery Fisher Career Grant, and Lincoln Center’s Emerging Artist Award.
Today the Calidore is based in New York City, and they appear at the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in their hometown; The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; London’s Wigmore Hall; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; Berlin’s Konzerthaus; the BBC Proms; Verbier; Ravinia; and more. They’ve premiered works by Caroline Shaw, Sebastian Currier, and Mark-Anthony Turnage, among many other leading composers, and their acclaimed discography has received such honors as BBC Music Magazine’s 2024 Chamber Award.
The Calidore serves as the University of Delaware’s Distinguished String Quartet in Residence, and highlights of their 2024–25 season include playing all of Beethoven’s string quartets throughout New York City as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Initiative for Music and Community Engagement—a new program launched by The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center—and releasing volume two of their complete recording of those same quartets.