Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violins

John Largess, viola

Joshua Gindele, cello.

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The Miró Quartet, winner of the 2000 Naumburg  Chamber Music Award, was praised as "furiously committed" by The New York Times and recognized for its exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity" by the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

For nearly 30 years, the Grammy-nominated quartet has performed on the world's most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, Texas, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music. Miró Quartet's projects include a touring and recording project with Lara Downes, Here on Earth, featuring musical depictions of our planet, its evolution, and the lives of its inhabitants; the premiere of a new version of Kevin Puts' Credo with the Naples Philharmonic; and collaborations with composers Steven Banks, Tamar-Kali, and Gabriel Kahane, as well as soprano Karen Slack.

The Miró Quartet was nominated for a 2025 GRAMMY Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for its second album on Pentone, Home, featuring two commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, as well as works by George Walker and Samuel Barber. The quartet recently produced an Emmy Award-winning audiovisual multimedia project title Transcendence, a documentary centered around a performance of Franz Schubert's Quartet in G Major on rare Stradivarius instruments.

The Miró Quartet formed in 1995, and in addition to Naumburg, was also a winner of the Banff International String Competition. Deeply committed to music education, the Quartet, since 2003, has served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. In 2005, the Quartet was awarded the Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Miró took its name and inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surealist works - with subject matter drawn from the real of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy - are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.

For its Naumburg concert on March 26, 2001 in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Quartet performed the world premiere and a Naumburg commission of David Schober's Quartet (2000).

Miró String Quartet, 2000 Chamber Music Award Winner

March 26, 2001, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center

Program

Haydn: Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2

David Schober: Quartet (2000) World premiere and Naumburg commission

Beethoven: Quartet No 15 in A minor, Op. 132

Program note by David Schober:

I have been intrigued by the paintings of Joan Miró ever since a visit to the Tate Gallery in London in 1996; a postcard I purchased there remained on my bulletin board for several years. When the Miró String Quartet asked me to write a new piece for them, it seemed only natural that I should further explore the work of their namesake artist. The musical result is not intended to be overtly representational of Miró's work, but it attempts to capture a glimpse of his exuberant imagery.

Vegetables Garden and Donkey - a work from Miró's mid-20s - depicts the earth, the living things upon it, and the furrowed sky, all with equal vitality. The quartet's opening movement, based loosely on this painting, is transparent but still restless. The incessant drive of the Scherzo is drawn not from a specific painting but rather from a "rhythmic" quality found in many works by the Catalan master: the distorted, whimsical shapes of Miró's early mature style, often set in sharply contrasting primary colors, convey an abundance of energy and motion.

Constellations, analogous to the zodiac, is comprised of 12 proportional sections arranged around a complex circle of fifths. The sections are most closely spaced in the middle of the movement; they recede again into broader spaces toward the end, like a comet sweeping through an eccentric orbit. The title also refers to a series of Miro's painting from 1940 and 1941 collectively known as the Constellation. Among these works is Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird, the inspiration for the Quartet's brief finale. Miró's image is a web of perpetual motion and tenuous lines tracing suggestions from human figures, birds and stars.

My friendship with the members of the Miró Quartet, the roots of which go back to the Oberlin Conservatory, has made the composition of this work all the more rewarding. The Quartet is affectionately dedicated to them, with heartfelt thanks to the Naumburg Foundation for making the collaboration possible.

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