UK String Quartets Invited to Perform at Prestigious French Festival
LEXINGTON, Ky. (April 24, 2018) — Two days from today, the Niles and Verdi String Quartets, graduate ensembles of the University of Kentucky School of Music, will perform a varied concert of 20th century music for string quartet at the second annual Festival de Paques in Deauville, France.
The prestigious Festival de Paques, scheduled for April 26, in Lexington’s sister city of Deauville has been presenting international caliber chamber music concerts in its horse auction venue for more than 20 years. As part of their participation in the festival the quartets will also perform for students from both Deauville and Trouville-sur-Mer. Both quartets performed at last year’s festival, the first non-European ensembles to do so, and were invited back to play this year.
The Niles and Verdi Quartets will play works by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Erich Wolfgang Korngold from Vienna, British composer Arnold Bax and American Jessie Montgomery. The Verdi Quartet will perform Quartet No. 1 in A major, Op. 16 by Korngold, written in 1922, and “Voodoo Dolls,” composed by Montgomery in 2008. The Niles Quartet will perform String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp minor, Op. 108, by Shostakovich, written in 1960, and Arnold Bax’s String Quartet No. 1 in G major, from 1918.
Members of the quartets are doctoral and master’s degree candidates in performance at the UK School of Music. They are principal players in the UK Symphony Orchestra and are taught and coached by faculty members Daniel Mason, Margaret Karp, Wendy Yates, Benjamin Karp and John Nardolillo. The musicians are YeDam Kim, Yichi Chiang, YeSeul Kim and Andrzej Kunecki, violins; Emily Kurlinski and Austin Han, violas; Joshua Bermudez and Xiaohang Yu, cellos.
This project is made possible by the generous support of Ben Kaufmann and Janet Zusman, UK College of Fine Arts, UK HealthCare, Robert and Dr. Kim Rosenstein, and Everett McCorvey and the UK Opera Theatre.
The UK School of Music in the UK College of Fine Arts has garnered national recognition for high-caliber education in opera, choral and instrumental music performance, as well as music education, music therapy, composition, and theory and music history.