Since making their Festival debut in 2024, the Verona Quartet has quickly become a Festival-audience favorite, and this summer they make their highly anticipated return playing music by Janáček, Ravel, and Brahms as well as premiering a Festival-commissioned work by the award-winning British composer Alex Paxton.
Founded (under a different name) at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in 2013, today the Verona Quartet—winner of the 2015 Concert Artists Guild Competition and 2020 Cleveland Quartet Award as well as the current quartet-in-residence at Oberlin College & Conservatory—is what they call “a string quartet for the 21st century,” bridging different genres, styles, and disciplines. Their name is an homage to Shakespeare (who set two of his plays in Verona) because he “was one of the greatest storytellers of all time, and music, at its essence, is storytelling,” violist Abigail Rojansky said in an interview with WGTE Public Media. “Music is just one of the very powerful mediums,” she added, “[and that’s] why we wanted to reach beyond our particular genre for our namesake. We also collaborate outside of the music field,” she continued, “and that’s an important part of who we are.”
Those important collaborations have included premiering a piece for string quartet, Chinese dulcimer, and dancer by Singaporean composer Cheng Jin Koh on commission from the Smithsonian Institution in honor of the Freer Gallery of Art’s 100th anniversary and participating in a live performance-art installation with Yugoslavian-born visual artist Ana Prvački at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The quartet has also joined forces with I’m With Her, a Grammy Award–winning folk trio, and premiered works written for them by Julia Adolphe, Sebastian Currier, Texu Kim, and Christopher Theofanidis as well as Michael Gilbertson’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated Quartet.
The Verona’s four members come from four different countries: Violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro are from Singapore and Canada, respectively; Rojansky, the violist, is from the US; and cellist Jonathan Dormand is from England. In that same WGTE interview, Dormand said that even though the members grew up “hearing different things in different corners of the world,” they’ve “come together” and “have this common language,” which allows them to “find this sound . . . that has reverence for the past but also [is] a sort of modern sound [that’s] very much rooted in where we are now.”
Listeners can hear all five of the Verona Quartet’s voices when they perform on three Festival programs this summer, beginning on August 5 with Janáček’s impassioned Kreutzer Sonata, which takes its name and inspiration from Tolstoy’s novella, which in turn took its inspiration from Beethoven’s sonata. Next, on August 9 & 10, the Verona plays Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro—a gorgeous harp showpiece that features Santa Fe Opera and Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Principal Harpist Grace Browning—and one of the all-time greats of the chamber music repertoire, Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet, with legendary clarinetist David Shifrin. For their final appearance of the season, on August 12, the Verona gives the world premiere of a Festival-commissioned string quartet by Alex Paxton, who’s been hailed as “a magician of sound” by the Financial Times and praised by The Sunday Times for bringing “wild and wacky to a new level” and by The Guardian for bringing “loopy joy to our ears.”