Calidore String Quartet with Bridget Kibbey, harp

The Calidore String Quartet is recognized as one of the world’s foremost interpreters of a vast chamber music repertory, from the cycles of quartets by Beethoven and Mendelssohn to works of celebrated contemporary voices like György Kurtág, Jörg Widmann, and Caroline Shaw. For more than a decade, the Calidore has enjoyed performances and residencies in the world’s major venues and festivals, released multiple critically acclaimed recordings, and won numerous awards. The Los Angeles Times described the musicians as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching.”  

Highlights of the 2023-24 season include return appearances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and People’s Symphony in New York as well as concerts in Seattle, Palm Beach, Ottawa, Toronto, Kalamazoo, and a European tour of United Kingdom, Estonia and Germany. Their upcoming collaborations this season include performances with pianist/composer Gabriela Montero, violist Matthew Lipman, harpist Bridget Kibby, and composer Sebastian Currier. Last season, the Calidore joined the Emerson String Quartet on their farewell tour and collaborated with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, clarinetist Anthony McGill, and bassist Xavier Foley.  

In their most ambitious recording project to date, the Calidore will release the complete Beethoven’s String Quartets for Signum Records in the 2024-25 season. Volume I, containing the late quartets, was released in 2023 to great critical acclaim. BBC Music Magazine said the Calidore’s performances “penetrate right to the heart of the music” and “can stand comparison with the best.” Their previous recordings on Signum include titles Babel with music by Schumann, Shaw, and Shostakovich, and Resilience with works by Prokofiev, Janáček, Golijov, and Mendelssohn.  

Founded at the Colburn School in Los Angeles in 2010, the quartet won grand prizes in virtually all the major U.S. chamber music competitions, including the Fischoff, Coleman, Chesapeake, and Yellow Springs competitions. The Quartet are recipients of the $100,000 Grand Prize of the 2016 M-Prize International Chamber Music Competition and the first and only North American ensemble to win the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship. Other awards include the Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, and they are currently in residence with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York.  

In 2021 the Calidore members joined the faculty of the University of Delaware School of Music and serve as artistic directors of the newly established Graduate String Quartet Fellowship Residency and the University of Delaware Chamber Music Series. 

To learn more about the Calidore String Quartet, please visit their website.  

Extraordinary harpist Bridget Kibbey, called “the Yo-Yo Ma of the harp” (by Vogue), is in demand for her virtuosic and soulful performances that transcend her instrument. At ease crossing classical, global, and jazz genres, Kibbey dives deep into historic narratives — from the Baroque, to the French Belle Époque to Persian modes, to nuevo Latino traditions and beyond – while resonating within the vanguard of the new. Through it all, Kibbey is illuminating the powerful expressive range of the concert harp to new audiences worldwide! Her chameleon tendencies at the harp and curatorial strengths find her performing with a growing rolodex of curation-meets-performance appearances.  According to The New York Times, “… she made it seem as though her instrument had been waiting all its life to explode with the energetic figures and colors she was getting from it.” 
 
Kibbey, who recently made her solo NPR Tiny Desk debut, is a winner of a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant, a Salon de Virtuosi SONY Recording Grant, the only harpist to win a place in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Bowers Program, and the Premiere Prix at the Journées de les Harpes Competition in Arles, France, among others. She has toured and recorded with luminaries Placido Domingo, Dawn Upshaw, Kathleen Battle, and Gustavo Santaollala for SONY Records and Deutsche Grammaphon; and, her own solo debut album, Love is Come Again, was named one of the Top Ten Releases by Time Out New York.  

2023-24 season highlights include debuts as soloist at Toronto’s Koerner Hall, Dumbarton Oaks, Caramoor, Music@Menlo, Festival Napa Valley, the VIVO Festival,  Saratoga PAC, and Alice Tully Hall with Artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as appearances as concerto soloist  

for 40,000 attendees at “Madison’s Concerts at the Capitol” premiering her own transcription of Rodrigo’s Concierto Aranjuez with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. She presents a newly-commissioned concerto by Brazilian composer João Luiz Rezende, exploring the sounds of carnaval, and tours projects of her own creation, merging her own solo transcriptions alongside powerful collaborations: The Sacred in the Profane, exploring French Masterworks of the Belle Époque alongside the famed Calidore String Quartet; and Leyenda, celebrating nuevo Latino voices alongside Latin Grammy Award-winning percussionist/composer Samuel Torres and acclaimed clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski. Kibbey most recently released her newest solo record, Crossing the Ocean, a virtuosic set of newly commissioned works by an international set of composers, synthesizing their native folk music with the contemporary, for Pentatone Records. 
 

Kibbey appears frequently as a concerto soloist and chamber musician in concert halls across the globe. To learn more about her, please visit her website.