Cassatt String Quartet In Concert At Shaarei Tikvah

The esteemed Cassatt String Quartet will perform at , on Sunday, April 22, 2012 at 3 p.m. 

Acclaimed as one of America's outstanding ensembles, the Cassatt String Quartet has performed throughout North America, Europe, and the Far East. These dynamic women have been named three times by The New Yorker magazine's Best Of The Year CD Selection, have recorded over twenty-five commercial releases and can be found on YouTube.   

Their beautiful and substantive program on April 22^nd features Gerald Cohen’s Playing for Our Lives, a piece that was actually commissioned by the Cassatt String Quartet. Gerald Cohen’s work is a contemporary memorial and tribute to the musical life of the Nazi concentration camp Terezin (Theresienstadt). 

Terezin, near Prague, was in essence a transit camp, where Jews and some other prisoners were kept until transport to the death camps such as Auschwitz. The Nazis allowed a certain amount of art and education to take place at Terezin, both as a way of occupying the prisoners, and also to serve their purpose of deceiving the world as to the nature of concentration camps in general. 

Other pieces on the April 22^nd program include Victor Ullman’s Qt. 3 and selections from Leos Janacek Intimate Letters.   

Formed in 1985 with the encouragement of the Juilliard Quartet, the Cassatt initiated and served as the inaugural participants in Juilliard's Young Artists Quartet Program. Their numerous awards include a Tanglewood Chamber Music Fellowship, the Wardwell Chamber Music Fellowship at Yale (where they served as teaching assistants to the Tokyo Quartet), First Prizes at the Fischoff and Coleman Chamber Music Competitions, two top prizes at the Banff International String Quartet Competition, two CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, a recording grant from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, and commissioning grants from Meet the Composer and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2004, they were selected for the centennial celebration of the Coleman Chamber Music Association in Pasadena, CA.

The Cassatt celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2006 with a series of world-premieres and a performance at the Library of Congress on the Library's Stradivarius Collection. Recently, the Cassatt offered concerts for the American Academy in Rome, Cornell and Syracuse Universities, were guest clinicians at the the Texas Music Educators Association and gave mini-residencies at the Centro National de las Artes in Mexico City, Vassar College and the University of Texas at Austin.

A $20 suggested donation will be welcomed at the door.   

For more information telephone 914-472-2013 X 302 or email naomi@shaareitikvah.org