This week, you can hear the Verona Quartet—hailed as an “outstanding ensemble of young musicians” by The New York Times—in their first-ever Festival performances!
On July 30 at noon, they present a fascinating, one-hour program that features an early quartet by Mozart (written when he was 17), Britten’s last instrumental work (composed the year before he died), and Verdi’s only string quartet (written while the composer was stranded in Naples after a production of his new opera, Aida, was delayed due to its star falling ill).
They also join other acclaimed Festival musicians for exciting works by Osvaldo Golijov and Castelnuovo-Tedesco on August 1 and Vivaldi on August 3. On August 4 & 5, they play Mahler’s monumental Das Lied von der Erde as members of a chamber orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles.
The Verona Quartet made their first major mark on the classical music scene in 2015 when they won the Concert Artists Guild Competition—a highly coveted honor that’s been helping musicians launch international careers for more than 70 years. In 2020, they won the prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award, which recognizes the most promising up-and-coming string quartets.
Violinists Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro, violist Abigail Rojansky, and cellist Jonathan Dormand formed the Verona Quartet a little more than a decade ago at Indiana University, where they were students at the time. Their name, Dormand explained in a recent interview with WSKG in New York, is a nod to Shakespeare. “We wanted to pay homage to possibly the greatest storyteller of all time,” he said, so they named themselves after the city where the Bard set three of his plays.
“Music is one of the greatest forms of storytelling,” Dormand added in that interview, and the Verona Quartet does their own kind of storytelling by performing a wide range of repertoire that includes new works written for them—such as Michael Gilbertson’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Quartet and music by Julia Adolphe, Sebastian Currier, and other leading composers—and by teaching and mentoring at Oberlin College and Conservatory, where they serve as quartet-in-residence.
The Verona Quartet has played at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York City; The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Wigmore Hall in London; the Melbourne Recital Centre; and other prestigious venues around the world. Catch them this week when they play in the intimate and historic St. Francis Auditorium right here in Santa Fe!
