We welcome this young, up-and-coming quartet, the Chiara, for its burgeoning reputation across the country, and also as a Celebration Season homage to the great young quartets who made our Series successful from the start. When young, professional string quartets first sat down together on the Morrison Center Recital Hall stage, the sound that rang out broke the barriers of our musical imagination. Joyous excitement, profound emotion, and technical excellence continue to communicate the great literature of the quartet, and the Chiara Quartet (Rebecca Fischer and Hyeyung Julie Yoon, violins; Jonah Sirota, viola; Gregory Beaver, cello) has a special take on this. Performing together since 2000, the Chiara has adopted a discipline of playing from memory, without printed sheet music. After memorizing a work, the Quartet is rewarded with deeply gratifying performances where each member feels fully present in the moment, truly performing with heart, by heart. The Chiara is currently recording Bartók by Heart, a 2-CD set featuring Bartók’s six string quartets, played entirely from memory, slated for release in 2016 on Azica. The quartet’s latest album, Brahms by Heart, was released on Azica in March 2014.

The Chiara has established itself among America’s most respected ensembles, lauded for its "highly virtuosic, edge-of-the-seat playing" (The Boston Globe). They are currently Hixson-Lied Artists-in-Residence at the Glenn Korff School of Music at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and were the Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University from 2008-2014. For the 2015-2016 season, the Chiara has been the quartet-in-residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, so we have been reading about them frequently in the New Yorker.

Chiara (key-ARE-uh) is an Italian word, meaning "clear, pure, or light."

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