Thu., January 12, 2012 / 6:30 PM

158 Bleecker Street , NY

Joseph Lin, violin • Ronald Copes, violin
Samuel Rhodes, viola• Joel Krosnick, cello

Since its inception in 1946, the Juilliard String Quartet has embodied the credo stated by founders Robert Mann and William Schuman to “play new works as if they were established masterpieces, and established masterpieces as if they were new.” The hallmarks of its distinctive sound – clarity of structure, beauty of sound, purity of line and an extraordinary unanimity of purpose – have been applied to virtually every era and genre in the literature, from Beethoven, Schubert and Bartók to Carter, Davidovsky, Babbitt and Wernick.

The Juilliard String Quartet continues its vibrant tradition of music-making and education in the 2011/12 season, with Joseph Lin as its new first violinist and colleague on the faculty of The Juilliard School. The Quartet will appear worldwide in prestigious venues, including in New York City and Philadelphia, at the Ravinia Festival, at Stanford University, and abroad in Berlin, Munich, London, Tokyo, Osaka and Macau, China.

This international schedule is in keeping with recent seasons in which the Quartet performed at the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Konzerthaus Berlin, the International Beethoven Festival in Bonn, the Palacio Real in Madrid, the Cité de la musique in Paris, the Miyazaki Festival in Japan, the Moscow International Performing Arts Centre, London’s Wigmore Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Musica Viva Chamber Music Festival in Australia, and the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. In the United States, they have appeared at Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Festival, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, Boston’s Jordan Hall, Los Angeles’s Disney Hall and San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.

The Quartet was created by the great American composer, William Schuman, then president of The Juilliard School, and the Quartet’s original first violinist, Robert Mann. The ensemble’s purpose would be to perform contemporary works as well as the great classical repertory, and to teach at Juilliard. These have been, and remain, the cornerstones of the JSQ mission.

During the course of its history, the JSQ has performed some 500 works, including the premieres of more than 60 pieces by American composers, with works by the country’s finest jazz musicians among them. The JSQ was the first ensemble to play all six Bartók quartets in the United States. The quartets of Schoenberg were rescued from obscurity by the ensemble’s performances.

With more than 100 releases to its credit, the JSQ is one of the most widely recorded string quartets of our time. The JSQ’s recordings of the complete Bartók quartets, the late Beethoven quartets, the complete Schoenberg quartets, and Debussy and Ravel quartets have all received Grammy Awards. Inducted into the Hall of Fame of the National Academy for Recording Arts and Sciences in 1986 for its first recording of the complete Bartók quartets, the Juilliard String Quartet was awarded the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik Prize in 1993 for Lifetime Achievement in the recording industry. In 2011, the Juilliard String Quartet became the first classical music ensemble to be honored by The Recording Academy with its Lifetime Achievement Award. For more info: www.juilliardstringquartet.org