Richard Festinger: String Quartets 2, 4 & 5

Richard Festinger

Richard Festinger has been a prominent and highly regarded figure in American contemporary music since the early 1980’s. An early interest in jazz in the 1970’s took him to Boston, where he worked with Gary Burton, Herb Pomeroy and Mick Goodrick at the Berklee School of Music, and he subsequently led his own groups as a jazz performer in the San Francisco Bay area before studying composition with Andrew Imbrie at the University of California in Berkeley.

Festinger’s work as a composer, comprising more than 80 compositions across a wide variety of genres, has been widely recognized for its elegance and emotive power. Frank J. Oteri, writing for the 2011 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, describes Festinger’s music as “notable for its combination of propulsive energy with an impeccable sense of poise and balance.” In his article on Festinger’s recordings in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Joshua Levine writes of Festinger’s work as “vibrant, skillfully wrought... intellectually and viscerally compelling music.” WQXR Radio has called him “an American master.”

The numerous awards and honors that have accrued to him include major commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aaron Copland Fund for music, the Argosy and Barlow Foundations, the Philadelphia Music Project, and the American Composers Forum. He is a recipient of the George Ladd Grand Prix de Paris, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters has twice recognized his work, with both the Walter Hinrichsen Award and an Academy Recording Award.

Some notable recent commissions include his String Quartet No. 3 (2015), commissioned by the Serge Koussevitzky Foundation for the Afiara Quartet; Cummings Settings (2016), written for the Resonant Bodies Festival in New York; the song cycle Careless Love (2017) written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players; Icarus in Flight (2018), commissioned by the Climate Music Project for the Telegraph String Quartet; the cantata for chorus and chamber orchestra Worlds Apart (2020), written for the Boston Cantata Singers; and his String Quartet No. 5 (2021).

A longtime resident of Northern California, in 1985 Festinger founded the well-known San Francisco based contemporary music ensemble Earplay, which he continues to direct. In 1990 he joined the music faculty of San Francisco State University as professor of music theory and composition, and served from 2010 to 2018 as Artistic Director of the Morrison Artists Series, San Francisco’s longest established presenter of professional chamber music concerts. He serves on the boards of Earplay, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Irving M. Klein International String Competition, and the League of Composers/International Society for Contemporary music. More recordings of his works are available on the Bridge, Centaur, CRI, CRS and Naxos International labels.

Verona Quartet

The Verona Quartet (Jonathan Ong and Dorothy Ro,violins; Abigail Rojansky, viola; Jonathan Dormand, cello) is recognized as a premier ensemble of its generation, praised by The New York Times as an “outstanding ensemble… cohesive yet full of temperament.” Recipients of the 2020 Chamber Music America Cleveland Quartet Award and the Fischoff National Chamber Music Association’s 2025 Educator Award, the ensemble has earned a reputation for its “bold interpretive strength” (Calgary Herald) and “opulent sonority” (The Strad). The Quartet serves on the faculty of Oberlin College and Conservatory as Quartet-in-Residence and as Artistic Directors of the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance. The ensemble’s rise to international prominence was fueled by a swift succession of top prize wins at Wigmore Hall, Melbourne, Osaka, M-Prize, and Fischoff International Chamber Music Competitions, as well as the 2015 Concert Artists Guild Competition.

A string quartet for the 21st century, the Verona Quartet pairs versatile programming with imaginative collaborations that bridge the time-honored canon and new, interdisciplinary works. Notable commissions and premieres include works by composers Christopher Theofanidis, Julia Adolphe, Texu Kim, and Sebastian Currier, as well as Michael Gilbertson’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Quartet. The Quartet recently celebrated several world premieres, including a work for string quartet, yangqin (Chinese dulcimer), and dancer by Cheng Jin Koh, commissioned by The Smithsonian Institution in honor of the centennial of the Freer Gallery of Art. The 2025 season marks the launch of a new project with American tenor Ben Bliss, featuring the American Songbook alongside art song literature. Past ventures highlight the group’s versatility, ranging from live-performance art installations with artist Ana Prvački to collaborations with the GRAMMY-winning folk trio I’m With Her.

Telegraph Quartet

The Telegraph Quartet (Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violins; Pei-Ling Lin, viola; Jeremiah Shaw, cello) formed in 2013 with an equal passion for the standard chamber music repertoire and contemporary, non-standard works alike. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “…an incredibly valuable addition to the cultural landscape” and “powerfully adept… with a combination of brilliance and subtlety,” the Telegraph Quartet is a previous recipient of the prestigious Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award and the Grand Prize at the Fischoff Chamber Music Competition.

The Quartet is currently the Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan. They have performed in concert halls, music festivals, and academic institutions across the United States and abroad, including New York City’s Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and Town Hall, San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s Chamber Music Tuesdays, Philharmonie de Paris, and at festivals including the Chautauqua Institute, Music in the Vineyards in Napa Valley, Interlochen Arts Festival, Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival, and the Emilia Romagna Festival. Prior to their residency at the University of Michigan, the Telegraph was the Quartet-in-Residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music between 2017-2024.

A fervent champion of 20th and 21st century repertoire, the Telegraph Quartet co-commissioned and gave the west coast premiere of John Harbison’s String Quartet No. 6. They premiered Richard Festinger’s String Quartet no. 4, Icarus in Flight, a musical representation of climate change data from 1880 to 2080; and premiered Robert Sirota’s String Quartet No. 3, Wave Upon Wave, at Weill Recital Hall for their Carnegie Hall debut in 2018, sponsored by the Naumburg Foundation.

Jasper String Quartet

The Jasper String Quartet (J Freivogel and Karen Kim, violins; Andrew Gonzalez, viola; Rachel Henderson Freivogel, cello) is celebrated as one of the preeminent American string quartets of the twenty-first century. Hailed by Gramophone as “flawless in ensemble and intonation, expressively assured and beautifully balanced,” the Quartet is highly regarded for its interesting programming, striving to evocatively connect the music of underrepresented and living composers to the canonical quartet repertoire.

A recipient of Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award (2012), the Quartet’s playing has been described as “sonically delightful and expressively compelling” (The Strad). The Quartet has released eight albums. Its most recent release, Insects and Machines: Quartets of Vivian Fung (2023), was praised by Strings Magazine as being “intensely dramatic throughout, demonstrating both their advocacy of new music and their transcendent mastery.” The Quartet’s 2017 release, Unbound, was named by The New York Times as one of the year’s 25 Best Classical Recordings.

Formed at Oberlin Conservatory, the Jasper String Quartet launched their professional career in 2006 at Rice University, and continued its training with the Tokyo String Quartet as Yale University’s Graduate Quartet-in-Residence in 2008. That same year, the Quartet swept through the competition circuit, winning the Grand Prize and Audience Prize in the Plowman Chamber Music Competition, the Grand Prize at the Coleman Competition, First Prize at Chamber Music Yellow Springs, and the Silver Medal at the 2008 and 2009 Fischoff Chamber Music Competitions. They were the first ensemble honored with Yale School of Music’s Horatio Parker Memorial Prize. The Jasper String Quartet is named after Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada.