Aizuri Quartet
Kim Kashkashian, viola
Marcy Rosen, cello

The Aizuri Quartet has established a unique position within today’s musical landscape, infusing its music-making with infectious energy, joy, and warmth. The ensemble cultivates curiosity in listeners and invites audiences into the concert experience through its innovative programming and the depth and fire of its performances. 

Praised by The Washington Post for “astounding” and “captivating” performances that draw from its notable “meld of intellect, technique and emotions,” the Aizuri Quartet was named the recipient of the 2022 Cleveland Quartet Award by Chamber Music America, and was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2018 M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition. The Quartet’s sophomore album, Earthdrawn Skies, was released in 2023. Featuring music of Hildegard of Bingen, Komitas Vartapet, Eleanor Alberga, and Jean Sibelius, Earthdrawn Skies was praised by NPR Music as an album that “convincingly connects the dots in wildly diverse music stretching over eight centuries…arousing solemn contemplation, cosmic curiosity, folksy delight and introspective scrutiny.”

The Quartet's debut album, Blueprinting, featuring works written for the Aizuri Quartet by five American composers, was released by New Amsterdam Records to critical acclaim (“In a word, stunning” —I Care If You Listen), nominated for a 2019 GRAMMY Award and named one of NPR Music’s Best Classical Albums of 2018. 

The Aizuri Quartet continues its innovative approach to programming into the 2023-24 season, with programs creatively juxtaposing the canon and the contemporary: Community emphasizes the communal atmosphere of chamber music around the world, placing works by Clara Wieck Schumann, Silvestre Revueltas, and Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn among pieces by living composers Judd Greenstein and Reena Esmail. Another signature Aizuri program, Sunrise, represents a journey from darkness into light, opening with a Clara Wieck Schumann song and Bartok’s ferocious and folk-inspired Fourth Quartet, and closing with Inuk composer-performer Tanya Tagaq’s Sivunittinni and Haydn’s Opus 76 No. 4 Quartet “Sunrise.”

In recognition of the Cleveland Quartet Award, Aizuri Quartet performs during the 2023-24 season at Chamber Music Detroit, Market Square Concerts, Friends of Chamber Music Kansas City, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, and Buffalo Chamber Music Society, where Aizuri will perform the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Azure Waves, written for the Quartet in celebration of the series’ 100th anniversary season. Last season the Quartet performed at Carnegie Hall, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, and Texas Performing Arts in Austin. 

This season, Aizuri Quartet welcomes new members: violist Brian Hong and cellist Caleb van der Swaagh. The Quartet will perform with several notable collaborators including Seth Parker Woods and Kirsten Docter at Chamber Music Detroit, Kim Kashkashian and Marcy Rosen at Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh at Chamber Music Concerts in Ashland, Oregon. Aizuri Quartet will be the inaugural Ensemble-in-Residence with the GRAMMY-winning New York Youth Symphony’s Crescendo, a new program for teenage New York City residents.

The Aizuri believes in an integrative approach to music-making, in which teaching, performing, writing, arranging, curation, and role in the community are all connected. In 2020 the ensemble launched AizuriKids, a free online series of educational videos for children that uses the string quartet as a catalyst for creative learning, featuring themes such as astronomy, American history, and cooking. These vibrant, whimsical, and interactive videos are lovingly produced by the Aizuri and paired with activity sheets to inspire further exploration. 

After signing with the prestigious artist-development management agency Concert Artists Guild, the quartet joined the roster of Pink Noise Agency. Formed in 2012 and combining four distinctive musical personalities into a powerful collective, the Aizuri Quartet draws its name from “aizuri-e,” a style of predominantly blue Japanese woodblock printing that is noted for its vibrancy and incredible detail.

Kim Kashkashian, internationally recognized as a unique voice on the viola, was born of Armenian parents in Michigan. She studied the viola with Karen Tuttle and legendary violist Walter Trampler at the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. Since fall 2000 she has taught viola and chamber music at New England Conservatory.

Following Grammy Award nominations for several previous recordings, Kashkashian received a 2012 Grammy Award in the "Best Classical Instrumental Solo" category for Kurtág and Ligeti: Music for Viola, on the ECM Records label. Kashkashian's recording, with Robert Levin, of the Brahms Sonatas won the Edison Prize in 1999. Her June 2000 recording of concertos by Bartók, Eötvös and Kurtág won the 2001 Cannes Classical Award for a premiere recording by soloist with orchestra.

In 2016, Kashkashian was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kashkashian has worked tirelessly to broaden the range of technique, advocacy, and repertoire for the viola. A staunch proponent of contemporary music, she has developed creative relationships with György Kurtág, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alfred Schnittke, Giya Kancheli, and Arvo Pärt, and commissioned works from Peter Eötvös, Ken Ueno, Thomas Larcher, Lera Auerbach, and Tigran Mansurian.

Marlboro Music and the Viennese school represented by her mentor, Felix Galimir, were major influences in developing her love of chamber music. Kim Kashkashian is a regular participant at the Verbier, Salzburg, Lockenhaus, Marlboro, and Ravinia festivals.

She has long-standing duo partnerships with pianist Robert Levin and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, and played in a unique string quartet with Gidon Kremer, Daniel Phillips, and Yo-Yo Ma.

As a soloist, she has appeared with the great orchestras of Berlin, London, Vienna, Milan, New York, and Cleveland, and in recital at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Kaufmann Hall, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, as well as in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Athens, and Tokyo.

Kashkashian's musicianship has been well represented on recordings through her association with the prestigious ECM label in a fruitful collaboration that has been continuous since 1985.

Kim Kashkashian has taught in Bloomington, Indiana, and in Freiburg and Berlin, Germany, and now resides with her daughter in Boston. Kim is a founding member of Music for Food, an initiative by musicians to fight hunger in their home communities.

Marcy Rosen has established herself as one of the most important and respected artists of our day. Los Angeles Times music critic Herbert Glass has called her "one of the intimate art's abiding treasures." She has performed in recital and with orchestra throughout Canada, England, France, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, and all fifty of the United States.

A consummate soloist, Ms. Rosen's superb musicianship is enhanced by her many chamber music activities. She has collaborated with the world's finest musicians including Leon Fleisher, Richard Goode, András Schiff, Peter Serkin, Mitsuko Uchida, Isaac Stern, Robert Mann, Sandor Vegh, Kim Kashkashian, Jessye Norman, Lucy Shelton, Charles Neidich and the Juilliard, Emerson, and Orion Quartets. She is a founding member of the ensemble La Fenice, a group comprised of oboe, piano and string trio, as well as a founding member of the world renowned Mendelssohn String Quartet. With the Mendelssohn String Quartet she was Artist-in-Residence at the North Carolina School of the Arts and for nine years served as Blodgett-Artist-in Residence at Harvard University. The Quartet, which disbanded in January of 2010, toured annually throughout the United States, Canada and Europe for 31 years.

Marcy performs regularly at festivals both here and abroad, including the Caramoor, Santa Fe, Ravinia, Saratoga and Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festivals, the Seattle International Music Festival, the Lockenhaus Kammermusikfest in Austria and the International Musicians Seminar in England. Since 1986 she has been Artistic Director of the Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival in Maryland and as a long time participant at the Marlboro Music Festival she has taken part in over 20 "Musicians from Marlboro" tours and performed in concerts celebrating the 40th, 50th, and 60th Anniversaries of the Festival.

Marcy Rosen was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and her teachers have included Gordon Epperson, Orlando Cole, Marcus Adeney, Felix Galimir, Karen Tuttle and Sandor Vegh. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. Ms. Rosen is currently Professor of Cello at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College and on the Faculty at the Mannes College of Music in New York City. She has also served on the faculties of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory and the University of Delaware.