Evolution: Chamber - Quartets, Piano Trios + Composers

Celebrating its 30th season, the Gryphon Trio is one of the world’s preeminent piano trios, garnering acclaim and impressing international audiences with its highly refined, dynamic and memorable performances.

With a repertoire that ranges from traditional to contemporary and from European classicism to modern-day multimedia, the Gryphons are committed to redefining chamber music for the 21st century.

Creative innovators with an appetite for discovery and new directions, the Gryphon Trio has commissioned over 100 new works, and frequently collaborates on projects that push the boundaries of chamber music. The trio tours regularly throughout North America and Europe, and their 22 recordings are an encyclopedia of works for the genre. Honours include three Juno Awards for Classical Album of the Year – most recently, that of 2019 – and the prestigious 2013 Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts from the Canada Council.

Deeply committed to music education and audience development, the Gryphons conduct master classes and workshops at universities and conservatories, and are artists-in-residence at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music and Trinity College. Dr. Jamie Parker is the Rupert E. Edwards Chair in Piano Performance and Annalee Patipatanakoon is Associate Professor of Violin and Head of Strings at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.

Since 2010, the trio’s multi-faceted arts creation program Listen Up! has engaged elementary school students, teachers and parents in 16 Canadian communities and provided them with the experience and knowledge required to participate actively in the arts.

The Gryphon Trio has had a long association with the Ottawa Chamberfest – Roman Borys served as Artistic Director between 2007-2015, as Artistic and Executive Director between 2015-2021 and Patipatanakoon and Parker served as Artistic Advisors between 2008-2021. The Trio are currently Directors of Classical Music Summer programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

The Eybler Quartet came together in late 2004 to explore the works of the first century and a half of the string quartet, with a healthy attention to lesser known composers such as their namesake, Joseph Leopold Edler von Eybler. The group brings a unique combination of talents and skills: razor-sharp ensemble skills, technical prowess, expertise in period instrument performance and an unquenchable passion for the repertoire. The Toronto- based ensemble’s live performances have consistently garnered praise as “glowing and committed”, “spirited” and “lively and energizing”. Their recording of Joseph Haydn’s Op. 33 String Quartets for the Analekta label was called “simply a treasure” by Early Music America, “the tempos are beautifully chosen, the ensemble perfect, and the intonation absolutely pure. This is music-making that reflects the deeply human and attractive qualities found in Haydn the composer—good humor, wit, and invention.” Their recording with clarinetist Jane Booth won praise from Gramophone for being “totally engaging performances that breathe life into Backofen’s music”. Their Beethoven Quartets, Opus 18 nos. 1-3 garnered this praise from Gramophone: “…the revelations flood in: the swiftness with which the Eyblers take the great Adagio of Op 18 No 1 allows violinist Aisslinn Nosky’s almost vibrato-free period-instrument tone to sound breathtakingly fragile.” Violinists Julia Wedman and Patricia Ahern, and violist Patrick G. Jordan are members of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Cellist Margaret Gay is much in demand as both a modern and period instrument player. This summer the group will again be on the faculty at the Banff Centre as part of the EQ: Evolution of the String Quartet program.

In September 2022 Patricia Ahern joined the group, replacing founding member Aisslinn Nosky.

Daniel Chong, violin | Ken Hamao, violin | Jessica Bodner, viola | Kee-Hyun Kim, cello

Internationally recognized for their “fearless, yet probingly beautiful” (The Strad) performances, the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet has rapidly distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation, dedicated purely to the sound and depth of their music. Inspired performances and exceptional musicianship are hallmarks of the Quartet, having appeared at the world’s most illustrious venues since its founding in 2002.

Recent seasons included performances around the United States and Europe, including Wigmore Hall, Konzerthaus Berlin, Music Toronto, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Strathmore, San Antonio Chamber Music Society, University of Chicago, the Schubert Club, and Kansas City’s Friends of Chamber Music.

This season the Quartet marks their 20th anniversary with The Beethoven Project, a multi-faceted initiative which includes performances of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets; the commissioning of six composers to write encores inspired by Beethoven’s quartets; the creation of a new video library spotlighting each Beethoven quartet; and bringing Beethoven’s music to non-traditional venues around the Quartet’s home base of Boston, including homeless shelters and youth programs.

The Quartet is committed to working with composers of today — recent commissions include works by Augusta Read Thomas, Felipe Lara, Jaehyuck Choi, and Zosha di Castri. Celebrating the process of creation, the Quartet recorded three new commissions by Kate Soper, Oscar Bettison, and Vijay Iyer as part of Miller Theatre’s Mission: Commission podcast.

Additionally, the Quartet regularly collaborates with a diverse range of artists, including pianists Menahem Pressler, Orion Weiss, Shai Wosner, Billy Childs, and Vijay Iyer; members of the Silk Road Ensemble; clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann; clarinetists Anthony McGill and Charles Neidich; flutist Claire Chase; and violist Kim Kashkashian, featured on their recent Dvořák recording. The Quartet also continues to be a strong supporter of Kashkashian’s project Music for Food, participating in concerts throughout the United States for the benefit of various food banks and shelters.

Recording projects continue to be an important facet of the Quartet’s artistic output. Described by Gramophone Magazine as a ”string quartet defined by virtuosity so agile that it’s indistinguishable from the process of emotional expression,” their newest release for ECM Records features Dvořák's Viola Quintet as well as György Kurtág's Six Moments Musicaux and Officium breve in memoriam. The Strad also declared the album as “nothing short of astonishing.” Under the auspices of the Monte Carlo Festival Printemps des Arts, they recorded a disc of three Beethoven quartets, of which Diapason “admired the group’s fearlessness, exceptional control, and attention to detail.” The Quartet can also be heard playing Mendelssohn on Nimbus Records, Bartók on Zig-Zag Territoires, and the complete Ligeti Quartets on Naxos, for which they won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

The members of the Parker Quartet serve as Professors of the Practice and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Department of Music. The Quartet also holds a visiting residency at the University of South Carolina and spends its summers on faculty at the Banff Centre’s Evolution: Quartet program.

Founded and currently based in Boston, the Parker Quartet’s numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award.

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Hailed by The New York Times as “our leading new-music foursome”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected experimental string quartets performing today. Comprising violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell, JACK operates as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the performance, commissioning, and appreciation of new string quartet music. The quartet was selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, nominated for GRAMMY Awards for recordings in 2018 & 2022, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant, as well as the Fromm Music Foundation Prize.

Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. The quartet has worked with artists such as Julia Wolfe, George Lewis, Helmut Lachenmann, and Caroline Shaw, with upcoming and recent premieres including works by John Luther Adams, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Tyshawn Sorey, Wadada Leo Smith, Amy Williams, and John Zorn. JACK’s all-access initiative, JACK Studio, funds collaborations with a selection of artists each year, who receive money, workshop time, mentorship, and resources to develop new works for string quartet.

Committed to education, JACK is the Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music, where they provide mentorship to Mannes’s Cuker and Stern Graduate String Quartet. They also teach each summer at New Music on the Point, a contemporary chamber music festival in Vermont for young performers and composers, and at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. JACK has long-standing relationships with the University of Iowa String Quartet Residency Program, where they teach and collaborate with students each fall and spring, as well as with the Lucerne Festival Academy, of which the four members are all alumni.

Photo by Shervin Lainez

Suzanne Farrin is a composer whose works have been performed around the world. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times called her first opera, dolce la morte, a work of “shattering honesty.” Her debut recording, Corpo di Terra, was described in Timeout Chicago, “like field recordings from inside the cerebral cortex.” Recent commissions include works for Talea Ensemble, The Library of Congress, Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet, and The International Contemporary Ensemble. She was a 2018 Rome Prize Winner and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition.

In addition to composing, Suzanne is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. Her life as an interpreter on the instrument has taken her to venues such as the Abrons Arts Center in NYC, Centro de Artes in Buenos Aires, as well as film and television. She has performed in film scores such as Chicuarotes (Gael Garcia Bernal, director), Sade Ma’bar/Blockage (Mohsen Gharaie, director), and USERS (Natalia Almada, director), which was featured at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. She appears as herself in an episode of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle (Roman Coppola, director).

Suzanne is the Frayda B. Lindemann Chair of Music at Hunter College and The C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center, where she teaches composition. She has been the lead mentor composer for Evolution: Quartet at the Banff Centre since 2021. She holds a doctorate in from Yale University. Her next opera, Macabéa, will be premiered at the Theatro São Pedro in São Paolo, Brazil in 2025 and is supported by the Siemens Foundation and the Consolate General of Brazil in New York.

Suzannah Clark, AKC, BMus, MMus, MFA, MA, PhD, is Professor of Music at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard in 2008, she taught at Oxford University for eight years. Clark specializes in the music of Franz Schubert, the history of music theory, and medieval music. Her book Analyzing Schubert was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. Clark has given lectures in the UK, USA, Canada, France and Germany and has held fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (Germany), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), British Academy (UK), Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). Most recently she was the William J. Bouwsma Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. She currently serves on Council for the American Musicological Society and, starting in 2013, will be Reviews Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society. At Harvard, Clark teaches courses primarily in music theory, but also in historical musicology. Suzannah Clark grew up mainly in Newfoundland, Canada and also went to schools in England, France and Italy. She did her undergraduate and master’s degrees at King’s College London (UK) and graduated with an MFA (1993) and PhD (1997) from Princeton University.

Violinist and violist Matt Albert is the Chair of Chamber Music at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan. He previously served as the Director of Chamber Music and SYZYGY at the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University. He was a founding member of Eighth Blackbird, with whom he received numerous awards, including first prizes at the Naumburg, Concert Artists Guild, Coleman, and Fischoff Competitions, and three Grammy awards for their recordings on Cedille Records. He serves as one of the concertmasters for Nu Deco Ensemble and regularly plays as the violist with Alarm Will Sound. Previous collaborations include work with Seraphic Fire, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Wilco, the Shreveport Symphony (as Concertmaster), the Baltimore Symphony, and the Sarasota Orchestra (as Associate Concertmaster). In the summers he mentors for Evolution: Classical at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and he plays principal second violin for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

Image by RR Jones.

Lesley Robertson (viola), performed across the globe for 33 years with the internationally celebrated St. Lawrence String Quartet. A native of Edmonton she now makes her home at Stanford University where, along with her SLSQ colleagues, she directs the chamber music program at the department of music. At Stanford she also teaches viola, coaches chamber music, and spearheads the SLSQ’s Emerging String Quartet Program and the SLSQ’s annual Chamber Music Seminar. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and The Juilliard School, Robertson also holds a  degree from the University of British Columbia where she studied with her mentor Gerald Stanick. She has toured with Musicians from Marlboro and served on the juries of the Banff, Melbourne, and Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competitions. With strong ties to the Banff Centre stretching back to her first summer program as a 7 yr old and continuing through decades of deeply formative experiences, Lesley is grateful and delighted to return in 2023. 

The dynamic, award-winning quartet, Kodak Quartet, is setting the world on fire with their passionate and energetic playing. They are highly regarded for their work with contemporary composers on new compositions and for presenting traditional works with a contemporary flavor. Kodak's members hail from the US, Canada, and France. Their international performance career brings concerts to a great diversity of people, recent highlights include concerts at Carnegie Hall, Merkin Hall, and the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance. They have also performed for thousands of children at non-traditional performance venues including school concerts, movie theaters, and working alongside Rob Kapilow in his program "What Makes it Great?". Kodak Quartet formed in Rochester, New York while attending the Eastman School of Music and are currently based in New York, NY. Kodak Quartet has performed with Grammy winning artists Time for Three, Kronos Quartet, and JACK Quartet. They have worked with members of the American, Beethoven, Juilliard, Pacifica, Verona, Jupiter, Arianna, JACK and Ying Quartets. The Kodak Quartet is currently the Cuker and Stern Resident String Quartet at the Mannes School of Music.

Edgar Donati (violin), Martin Noh (violin), Daniel Spink (viola), Blake Kitayama (cello)

The Kodak Quartet is generously supported by the Repsol Emerging Artists Award.

The Waldstein Trio, previously known as "Metastos Trio", was formed in early 2022 in London, UK by Greta Papa - violin (Greece-Albania), Miguel Ángel Villeda - cello (Mexico) and Christos Fountos - piano (Cyprus-Greece). The Trio achieved significant early success, winning the 2nd prize at the CAVATINA Intercollegiate Chamber Music Competition at Wigmore Hall in just the second month of its formation and less than a year later the 1st Great Award for Chamber Music at the 4th Vienna International Music Competition, leading to a performance in the Musikverein-Brahms Saal, Vienna. The Waldstein Trio currently holds the Carne Trust Junior Fellowship in chamber music at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. The members of the  Trio are very keen to perform not only the core repertoire for piano trio, but also to collaborate with other musicians and composers. Future performances include Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, a Shostakovich chamber music cycle in London, the Brahms 1st and 3rd Piano Quartets in Malta and further trio performances in Cyprus, London and Manchester.

The Waldstein Trio are generously supported by the Bryan Price and Christine Choi Travel Awards and the Finch Chamber Music Scholarship Fund.

London-based ensemble The Primrose Quartet was founded in 2021 at the Royal Academy of Music. Since its formation, the Quartet has performed recitals across England and now at the Banff Centre's Evolution Chamber festival. At the Royal Academy of Music, the Quartet was part of the Frost ASSET Quartet scheme where they performed concerts and taught masterclasses at schools across London. While there, they were coached by world renowned violinist, Gyorgy Pauk. The members of Primrose Quartet are currently Ryan Char and Cameron Alan-Lee on violin, Clement Pickering on viola, and Shannon Ross on cello.

The Primrose Quartet are generously supported by the Bryan Price and Christine Choi Travel Awards and the Finch Chamber Music Scholarship Fund.

The Thunder Bay String Quartet is a collection of colleagues and most importantly, friends, hailing from the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra. They met through concert board game nights and a mutual love of Chris and Kimberly's Pembroke Welsh corgi Bowser. The TBSQ looks forward to making chamber music together and is excited to bring this love of the chamber music repertoire to their audiences.

Chris Stork (violin), Kimberly Durflinger (violin), John Sellick (viola), Bryce Penny (cello)

The Thunder Bay String Quartet is generously supported by the Repsol Emerging Artists Award.

Napoletano Quartet was formed in 2023 by Historical Performance students of the Juilliard School, Cristina Prats-Costa, Ryan Cheng, Tsutomu William Copeland, and Andrew Koutroubas. With a passion for the multicultural landscape of the early music of southern Italy, the Napoletano Quartet focuses on presenting high-energy programs that aim to tell stories through music, and to move audiences to their core. As founding members of Concerto Napoletano and making their New York debut at Church of the Good Shepherd in February 2023, the ensemble was recently awarded a place in the GEMS midtown concert series in New York. Napoletano Quartet has received paramount direction from illustrious musicians and pedagogues such as Robert Mealy, Rachel Podger, Cynthia Roberts and most recently, the faculty of Banff Centre's Evolution: Chamber, specifically the Eybler Quartet and Suzie Clark.

Cristina Prats-Costa (violin), Ryan Cheng (violin), William Copeland (viola), Andrew Koutroubas (cello)

The Napoletano Quartet is generously supported by the Repsol Emerging Artists Award.

The Faust Trio was created in 2022 at a crossroad between the CNSM Paris and the Menuhin Academy (Switzerland) in which its members are currently studying with professors Clemens Hagen and Marie-Josèphe Jude. Comprised of violinist Clément Pimenta, cellist Cyprien Lengagne and pianist Oscar Nguyen, the three musicians are already enjoying active individual solo and chamber music careers internationally, playing in festivals such as Les Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, Le Festival International de Piano de La Roque d'Antheron, and the Georges Enescu Festival. This June they will participate in the Banff Centre's Evolution: Chamber program that will offer them the chance to work with the Gyrphon Trio, the Eybler Quartet, the JACK Quartet, and the Parker Quartet in Banff, Canada. They also benefited from masterclasses from great musical personalities such as Marc Danel, Lionel Cottet, and Olga Sitkovetsky. In 2023-2024, they'll enter the Nederlandse Strijkkwartet Academie (NSKA).

The Faust Trio is generously supported by Fondation David R. Graham and the Barbara and John Poole Memorial Endowment.

Cole Dorchester (b.2000) is a composer, vocalist, and electronic musician based in Edmonton, Alberta. Their work runs a wide gamut of styles - focusing on timbre, the emotive effects of alternative tuning systems, and delicate interwoven textures. They are currently pursuing studies in music composition at the University of Alberta, and have studied composition with Dai Fujikura, Scott Smallwood, and Nicolás Arnáez.

Cole Dorchester is generously supported by the Gladys and Merrill Muttart Foundation Endowment.

Elise Arancio is a composer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her orchestral and chamber works have been performed across the country and internationally by ensembles including the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Curtis Symphony Orchestra, Youth Orchestra of the USA, PRISM saxophone quartet, Sandbox Percussion, and Emory Youth Symphony Orchestra, among others. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with the Rock School of Dance Education in Philadelphia and the One Book, One Philadelphia program, and her work was also featured as part of WHYY/PBS's series "On Stage at Curtis". Some of her recent accolades include being selected as a winner of the 2022 Les Écoles D'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau Ravel Prize, and the 2020 Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra's Call for Scores. She has been a visiting composer at Music from Angel Fire and the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, and has attended programs at Les Écoles D'Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, Mostly Modern The Netherlands, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Curtis Young Artists Summer Program, and Yellowbarn Young Artist Program, among others. She joined Carnegie Hall's National Youth Orchestra as an apprentice composer in the summer of 2018. Elise graduated with a B.M. from the Curtis Institute of Music where she studied with Steve Mackey, Amy Beth Kirsten, Jennifer Higdon, Richard Danielpour, Nick DiBerardino, and David Serkin Ludwig. She will be pursuing her M.M. at the Juilliard School as a recipient of a Kovner fellowship.

Elise Arancio is generously supported by the Barbara and John Poole Memorial Endowment.

Sem Hak (1994) is a composer, musician, designer, (web)developer and all-around artist hailing from The Netherlands. Their upbringing in the most forested region of the The Netherlands taught them to appreciate the world around them and find beauty and inspiration in the most inconspicuous of things. Later moving to Utrecht, Sem studied composition with Caroline Ansink and Jeroen D'Hoe while now pursuing a master's degree in composition with Friso van Wijck in Rotterdam.  Sem writes for a wide variety of instrumentations and settings, from solo-instrument to large symphonic orchestra, from a piece to celebrate the foundation of the Dutch city of Nijmegen to a piece to translate climate-change data into music to make complicated scientific data comprehensible to a bigger audience to emphasize its importance. Sem works best combining their different talents as well as when contributing to making the world a better place through supporting LGBTQ+ efforts and other crucial endeavors like nature conservation and climate change with their art. With their autonomous music, Sem attempts to transport listeners to their world using intricately crafted static harmonies intertwined with percussive and rhythmically complex structures.

Sem Hak is generously supported by the Maria Francisca Josepha Brouwer Fund for Dutch Artists.

Mari Alice Conrad is an award-winning composer living in Alberta, Canada. Her works have been performed by various ensembles across Canada, and in the United States, and Europe. Mari Alice specializes in writing concert works for chamber ensembles, choirs, soloists, and large ensembles in a variety of genres. Performances of her works have been presented at Ottawa Chamberfest, Vancouver's Allegra Chamber Orchestra FestivELLE, Été musical de Barachois in New Brunswick, in the Žofín Palace for the World Wind Music Festival and WASBE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, Toronto's East Chamber Music Festival, New Music Edmonton Summer Solstice Festival, GroundSwell Concert Series in Manitoba, Modulus Festival in Vancouver, New Music Concerts in Toronto, and the Toronto 2022 Choral Canada's Podium Conference as the recipient of the Stephen Chatman Student Award in Choral Composition. Mari Alice's compositional practice shines an exceptional light on the human condition and fosters curiosity, authenticity, connection, and collaboration, creating a compelling experience for both performers and audience alike. Mari Alice holds a BMus and MMus in composition and is beginning a doctoral program in composition this fall at the University of Alberta.

Mari Alice Conrad is generously supported by the Lockwood Family Endowment Fund for Music.