The Arianna, Jupiter, Fry Street and Pacifica String quartets will each spend a week in residence during the four week Chamber Music for Strings. The Jupiter String Quartet --new to Madeline Island Music Camp this year-- won first prize in the Banff International String Quartet and grand prize in the Fischoff National Chamber Music competitions. They are members in Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society Two and received Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award, which “honors and promotes a rising young string quartet whose artistry demonstrates that it is in the process of establishing a major career.” The quartet also won the 2005 Young Concert Artists International auditions and now holds YCA’s Helen F. Whitaker Chamber Music Chair. Most recently, they were honored to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant.
The Pacifica String Quartet’s career continues to flourish. Most recently they were featured in a full page article in the New York Times about their performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where they are succeeding the Guarneri String Quartet for the Museum’s chamber music concert series. The Pacifica began teaching at the Music Camp in 2001 and the quartet has taught at the camp every year since with the exception of 2009. Because of their prominent role in the camp’s growth over the last ten years, it is especially gratifying that they are able to be part of the camp’s 25th Anniversary celebration week July 5-11. Typical of their spirit of cooperation, they will go beyond the normal role of performing as a quartet, but will also rehearse and perform with alumni and college students from the class of 2010 for the 25th Anniversary Concert on July 10.
The Arianna String Quartet–in residence at the University of Missouri, St. Louis–and the Fry Street Quartet–in residence at Utah State University– have become enduring resident quartets for the Madeline Island Music Camp. Starting off the season will be the Arianna, whose philosophy and approach to teaching chamber music, sets a tone of team-like spirit and non-competitive atmosphere which are hallmarks of the camp’s core values. And the Fry Street–with the inimitable and entertaining first violinist Will Fedkenheuer–make camp such fun, that students don’t want the camp to end.
Joining Ken Goldsmith, distinguished professor of violin of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Texas is James Dunham, former violist with the famed Cleveland String Quartet and also a professor at Rice. Lucie Robert, professor of violin at the Manhattan School of Music, returns for her third year and will host the camp’s first New York auditions in January. Felicia Moye, who succeeds the camp’s former artistic director Vartan Manoogian who died in 2007, as violin professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will return for her second season. Richard Marshall, assistant principal violist with the Minnesota Orchestra and Anthony Arnone, professor of cello at the University of Iowa, return for their second season. Julia Bullard, professor of viola at the University of Northern Iowa returns for her third season. New this year is cellist Yeon Jin Kim, an assistant of cello professor Richard Aaron of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
