Kronos Quartet: Featuring music by Nicole Lizée

Kronos Quartet

David Harrington, violin
Gabriela Díaz, violin
Ayane Kozasa, viola
Paul Wiancko, cello

For 50 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet has reimagined what the string quartet experience can be. One of the most celebrated and influential groups of our era, Kronos has given thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than 70 recordings, and collaborated with many of the world’s most accomplished composers and performers across many genres. Kronos has received more than 40 awards, including three Grammys and the Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes.

Through its nonprofit organization, Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has commissioned more than 1,100 works and arrangements for quartet. KPAA also manages Kronos’ concert tours, local performances, recordings, and education programs, and produces an annual Kronos Festival in San Francisco. In its most ambitious commissioning effort to date, KPAA has recently completed Kronos Fifty for the Future. Through this initiative, Kronos has commissioned—and distributed online for free—50 new works for string quartet designed for students and emerging professionals, written by composers from around the world. 

David Harrington is founder, artistic director and violinist of San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet. Since 1973 he has initiated the addition of more than 1,100 works to Kronos' repertoire by composers from far-reaching corners of the musical world. He has planned thousands of concert programs which have injected fresh life and urgency into the live concert experience. He also has curated 76 recordings of bracing variety and scope and selected the composers for Kronos’ Fifty for The Future project which allows the entire field free entry into the Kronos world. Kronos has received many awards including three Grammys, the Polar Music Prize and the Kronos album ‘Pieces of Africa’ was inducted into the National Recording Registry. David was the 2024 Kluge Scholar in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress where he worked closely with the Library’s American Folklife Center to research and plan 'Triptych: US at 250’, set to be the most expansive concert in Kronos history. David looks forward to enlarging his work with Kronos to continually discover and perform inspiring, activating new works from throughout the vast world of music while mentoring next generations of composers and performers.

Gabriela Díaz began her musical training at the age of five, studying piano with her mother, and the next year, violin with her father.  A childhood cancer survivor, Gabriela is committed to supporting cancer research and treatment as a musician. In 2004, she was awarded a grant from the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship to organize a series of chamber music concerts in cancer units at various hospitals in Boston; this project is now a part of her chamber music organization and concert series, Winsor Music (winsormusic.org). 

A fierce champion of contemporary music, Gabriela has worked closely with many significant composers, including Pierre Boulez, Joan Tower, Jessie Montgomery, Tania León, and Helmut Lachenmann. Gabriela is a member of The International Contemporary Ensemble, A Far Cry, Castle of Our Skins, Sound Icon, is concertmaster of BMOP, and appears frequently with chamber music ensembles throughout the United States. Gabriela teaches at Wellesley College and the Longy School of Music at Bard College. Critics have acclaimed Gabriela as “a young violin master,” and “one of Boston’s most valuable players.” Lloyd Schwartz of the Boston Phoenix noted, “…Gabriela Diaz in a bewitching performance of Pierre Boulez’s 1991 Anthèmes. The come-hither meow of Diaz’s upward slides and her sustained pianissimo fade-out were miracles of color, texture, and feeling.” Others have remarked on her "indefatigably expressive" playing, “polished technique,” and “vivid and elegant playing.” Gabriela can be heard on New World, Centaur, BMOPSound, Mode, Naxos, and Tzadik records. Her recording of Lou Harrison's Suite for Violin and American Gamelan was highlighted in the New York Times Article, "5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Classical Music." Gabriela is proud to be a core member of the team that created Boston Hope Music, bringing music to patients and frontline workers during the pandemic. 

Hailed for her "magnetic, wide-ranging tone" and her "rock solid technique" (Philadelphia Inquirer), violist Ayane Kozasa is a sought-after chamber musician, collaborator, and educator. Since winning the 2011 Primrose International Viola Competition—where she also captured awards for best chamber music and commissioned work performances—Ayane has appeared on stages across the world, from Carnegie to Wigmore Hall. As the newly appointed violist of the Kronos Quartet, she will be collaborating this season with artists such as visual story-teller Ariel Aberg-Riger and composer Peni Candra Rini. She is also a part of the viola/cello duo Ayane & Paul as well as the quartet collective Owls. Ayane was also a founding member of the Aizuri Quartet, with whom she toured extensively for 11 years until 2023, garnering a Grammy nomination and collaborating with artists such as Wilco and Maeve Gilchrist.

Much of Ayane’s current work involves mentoring young musicians through programs like the Meadowmount School of Music, and she is currently on the viola faculty at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Taking inspiration from her own mentors the Cavani Quartet, Ayane has developed several education-based music shows curated especially for the youth in a festival’s community including Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts and Spoleto Festival USA. Aside from music, she enjoys hiking, doodling, and creating animation.

Paul Wiancko is an acclaimed composer, Director of Chamber Music at Spoleto Festival USA, cellist of the internationally celebrated Kronos Quartet, and founding member of the viola-cello duo Ayane & Paul and quartet-collective “dream group” (NY Times) Owls. The Washington Post calls Wiancko “a restless and multifaceted talent who plays well with others,” a reference to his collaborations with artists ranging from Max Richter, Chick Corea, and Norah Jones—to members of the Guarneri and JACK quartets—to bands like Arcade Fire, Dirty Projectors, and Wye Oak. “Even with this chronically collaborative spirit,” the Post continues, “Wiancko maintains a singular voice as a composer.”

Paul has been composer-in-residence at Spoleto Festival USA, Caramoor, Music from Angel Fire, Portland Chamber Music Festival, and numerous others, and has been commissioned by Alisa Weilerstein, Alexi Kenney, Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, and the St. Lawrence, Kronos, Aizuri, Calder, and Attacca Quartets. His music has been described as “delicate, harmonically rich,” “joyous, hard-driven” (NY Times),  “dazzling, compelling” (Star Tribune), and “vital pieces that avoid the predictable” (Allan Kozinn). “If Haydn were alive to write a string quartet today,” NPR writes, “ it may sound something like Paul Wiancko's LIFT”—a piece that the NY Times says “teems with understanding of and affection for the string-quartet tradition.”

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald), and “utterly inspiring” (I Care If You Listen), award winning composer and filmmaker Nicole Lizée explores themes of malfunction, turntablism, rave culture, urbex, film theory, psychedelia, game culture, experimental fashion, and thrash metal to create a new kind of expression.

Nicole’s works are regularly performed worldwide to international acclaim. Her commission list of over 60 works includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Bang On A Can, National Arts Centre Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and Sō Percussion.

Awards include the 2024 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year, the 2023 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera, the Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, and the Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music.

Scott Fraser is a Grammy-winning recording, mixing, mastering, and concert engineer, producer, and sound designer for acoustic music recordings and live performances. He specializes in classical, jazz, folk, world and avant-garde genres. In a career spanning multiple decades he has engineered over 700 albums, as well as having mixed thousands of concerts worldwide.  

Since 1992 he has toured extensively as sound designer for the Kronos Quartet. Scott has mixed over a thousand concerts for Kronos, in venues including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House, Kennedy Center, Disney Hall, La Scala, Concertgebouw, etc.  

Scott co-produced, recorded, and mixed the Laurie Anderson/Kronos Quartet collaboration Landfall, which won the 2018 Grammy for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. He co-produced, recorded, mixed, and mastered You’ve Stolen My Heart, an album of Bollywood classics, interpreted by Kronos, featuring the legendary vocalist Asha Bhosle. In 2005 it was nominated for a Grammy in the World Music category. Scott also engineered The Ten Thousand Things, music of John Cage, as well as the Harry Partch compendium Bitter Music, both of which were Grammy nominees. In 2021, Scott recorded tracks for Opium Moon’s Night + Day CD, and mixed & mastered classical guitarist Mak Grgic’s Mak|Bach CD, both of which received Grammy nominations.

Scott has also worked with artists as diverse as Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, The Residents, Harold Budd, The Klezmatics, Katia & Marielle Lebeque, Tigran Hamasyan, Sandra Tsing-Loh and Mel Tormé.

Scott has taught recording master classes at Tainan University of Technology in Taiwan, New York University in Abu Dhabi, & Scripps College in Claremont, California.