Wilma Smith and Judith Eissenberg, violins

Mary Ruth Ray, viola

Rhonda Rider, cello

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Winner of a 1984 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, the Lydian String Quartet, formed in 1980, has been acclaimed by audiences and critics across the USA and abroad for embracing the full range of the string quartet repertory with curiosity, virtuosity, and dedication to the highest artistic ideals of music making.

During its formative years, the quartet studied with Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet. The quartet is known for their depth of interpretation, performing with "a precision and involvement marking them as among the world's best quartets" (Chicago Sun-Times). Residing at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts from 1980-2025, the Lydians continue to offer compelling, insightful, and dramatic performances of the quartet literature.

The Lydian String Quartet has performed extensively throughout the United States at venues such as Jordan Hall in Boston; the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Lincoln Center, Miller Theater, and Weill Recital Hall in New York City; the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and the Slee Beethoven Series at the University at Buffalo. Abroad, the Quartet has made appearances in France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Armenia, and Taiwan.

The Lydians have created intriguing thematic programming such as "Around the World in a String Quartet," a multi-year concert series that explores string quartet music from local world musical traditions in and beyond the western European art music setting; and "Vienna and the String Quartet," a project surveying the heart of the Western classical string quartet repertory by juxtaposing new and old Vienna.  In addition to traditional concerts, the quartet offers programming with themes exploring concepts of time, place, the vernacular, and identity, as well as single composer programs, all-contemporary programs, cross-cultural collaborations, and mixed media programs (video, electronics, live painting projections).  The Lydians enjoy working with other artists, in traditional configurations as well as in boundary-crossing performances.  Most recently, these included such musicians as tabla player Sandeep Das, pipa player Chen Yihan, Syrian clarinetist/composer Kinan Azmeh, and others.

The Lydians have long championed the commissioning, performing and recording of new works.  They enjoy working with young composers at Brandeis as well as in mini-residencies at universities across the US.  In recognition of their work, the quartet has received numerous Chamber Music America/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, grants from the Meet the Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

In 2012 their first Lydian String Quartet Commission Prize drew over 400 applicants; as a result, first prize-winner Kurt Rohde wrote his epic string quartet treatises for an unrecovered past for the Lydians, who premiered it in 2013 and recorded it in the summer of 2015. The 2015 LSQ Commission Prize was awarded to composer Steven Snowden, who wrote Bird Catching From Above for the Lydians' premiere in the spring of 2016. The  2017 LSQ Commission Prize was awarded to Saad Haddad, who wrote his String Quartet for the Lydians' premiere in the spring of 2018. The 2020 LSQ Commission Prize winner is Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon.

The Lydians' 29 currently available commercial recordings reflect their diverse and far-reaching repertoire, including works by Beethoven, Brahms, Ives, Ornstein, Persichetti, and Schubert as well as American contemporary composers they have long known and collaborated with such as Martin Boykan, Eric Chasalow, Peter Child, John Harbison, Lee Hyla, Steven Mackey, Kurt Rohde, Harold Shapero, and Yehudi Wyner. Their recording of John Harbison's String Quartet No. 3 and "The Rewaking" was chosen by both The New York Times and The Boston Globe as one of the best classical recordings of 2001.  

John Harbison wrote of the quartet: "Each time I encounter the Lydian Quartet my admiration for their technical, structural, and communicative power continues to grow. They are the complete package, and the wider my travels, the deeper goes my conviction."

Of their (2012) recording of Beethoven's late quartets, Paul Rapoport of Fanfare magazine said, "these are fine and distinctive performances, recorded in very realistic sound. The dense counterpoint of the Grosse Fuge benefits especially from the textural clarity characteristic of these performances, and the Lydian players turn in one of the most cleanly executed and precisely articulated renditions of this difficult movement in my experience. Jeremy Eichler from The Boston Globe‚ wrote, of the release: "These distinguished readings are full of subtlety, tonal refinement, and a sense of accumulated musical wisdom."

The members of the Lydian String Quartet are on the faculty of Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts.

As part of their Naumburg award the Lydian String Quartet was awarded a commission, "String Quartet No. 2" by Lee Hyla, which received its New York premiere on the Lydian's Naumburg concert that took place on March 11, 1985 in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. The work's world premiere was given by the Lydian String Quartet at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC in 1985.

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Naumburg Concert, March 11, 1985, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

Lydian String Quartet, 1984 Naumburg Chamber Music Award

Wilma Smith and Judith Eissenberg, violins; Mary Ruth Ray, viola; Rhonda Rider, cello

Program

Alban Berg: String Quartet, Op. 3

Lee Hyla: String Quartet No. 2, NY premiere and Naumburg commission

Beethoven: String Quartet, Op. 59, No. 1

The String Quartet No. 2 (1985) compartmentalizes its more extreme contrasts in three movements. The opening movement, the most complex of the three, displays an intriguing rotation of foreground and background elements, as the fast, repeated figure accompaniment comes to occupy center stage and then moves off again to one side. The second movement, marked "nearly motionless," suspends all conflict. The overtones of the cello tremelos furnish much of the pitch material of the upper parts. The spirited third movement resumes some of the arguments of the first movement with a catchy modal melody-knowledgeable listeners may detect a quotation from "Hip Hug-Her" by Booker T. and the MGs.

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The current members of the Lydian String Quartet are Clara Lyon and Julia Glenn, violins; Mark Berger, viola and Joshua Gordon, cello

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