2027 Guest Artists

Ya-Fei Chuang · Wael Farouk · Alexander Kobrin · Jeffrey Langford · Robert Levin · Ricardo Lugo Garay · Anna Park · Victor Rosenbaum · American String Quartet

Ya-Fei Chuang’s performances have been hailed by the BBC Magazine, Berlin Tagesspiegel, Boston Globe, Fanfare Magazine, Gramophone and the New York Times, among others. Her mentor, Alfred Brendel, has praised her as “a pianist of extraordinary ability, intelligence, sensitivity and command…” Commenting on her newly released Chopin/Liszt recording, he stated, "If you want to listen to Chopin and Liszt with different ears, Ya-Fei Chuang's ecstatic performances cannot leave you cold, and her pianism is staggering;" and Remy Franck called it "...masterful...thrilling...phenomenal" (Classical Music Journal).  Reviewing her live recording of the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto No.1, Fanfare Magazine hailed her "delicacy and fluidity of touch ... this version now sits at the top of the pile of Mendelssohn Firsts, alongside Perahia, [Rudolf] Serkin, and John Ogdon."

Ya-Fei Chuang is University Professor at Mozarteum University in Salzburg, was visiting professor at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, and has taught a piano performance seminar for nearly two decades at the New England Conservatory.  She is a sought-after teacher of master classes worldwide, including regularly at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (France), Lieven International Piano Foundation in Vienna, and since 2008 she has given an annual two-week master class at the International Summer Academy at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. During the summer of 2027 she will be teaching master classes at PianoTexas International Festival & Academy, which is closely associated with the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.  She has served on the juries of international piano competitions, most recently at the Grieg Competition in Norway, the Beethoven Competition in Vienna and Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn.

Ya-Fei Chuang’s upcoming concerts include appearances at Carnegie Hall (NYC), Boston, Wigmore Hall (London), Salzburg, and Vienna.  Having performed in nearly thirty countries, her appearances as a soloist include the orchestras of Berlin, Boston, City of Birmingham, Israel, London, Malaysia, San Francisco and Tokyo; at the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, Berlin Schauspielhaus, the Gewandhaus (Leipzig), the Barbican Centre and Queen Elisabeth Hall (London), Boston’s Symphony Hall, the National Concert Hall (Taipei), and Suntory Hall (Tokyo), among others; more recently she has appeared in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Norway, Poland, Taiwan, Tokyo, America.  Her festival appearances include Verbier, Ruhr, Schleswig-Holstein, the European Music Festival (Germany), the Bach Festival (Leipzig), the Mozartwoche (Salzburg), the Mozart Festival (Romania), the Beethoven Festival (Warsaw and Krakow), Shannon (Ireland), Oulu (Finland), and in the US at Gilmore, Grand Piano Series, Nevada, Newport, Oregon Bach Festival, Ravinia, Rockport, Sarasota, 92nd Street Y, Tanglewood, and at all major music festivals in Taiwan.

She has performed in the Celebrity Series in Boston, at the Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard, the Harvard Musical Association, the International Music Sessions in Prussia Cove, England, and with the New York Philomusica.  She performs frequently with the Spectrum Ensemble Berlin, and has appeared in duo performances with Pierre Amoyal, Alban Gerhardt, Kim Kashkashian, Boris Pergamenschikow, and is a frequent partner of Steven Isserlis and Robert Levin.  She has collaborated in duo and chamber music performances with concertmasters and principal players of the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

She is equally adept at playing the fortepiano and has performed with leading ensembles on period instruments, including Boston Baroque, Concerto Köln, the Handel & Haydn Society, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Philharmonia Baroque. She recently gave a concert at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, on a newly restored 1820s Fritz fortepiano; and she has performed and recorded as soloist the three Mozart double and triple concertos with Robert Levin, Laurence Cummings, and the Academy of Ancient Music in London to great critical acclaim.

Chuang's mastery of the most challenging solo and chamber music repertoire is complemented by her passionate commitment to contemporary music. She has premiered numerous works by international prize winners Thomas Oboe Lee, Alexander Müllenbach, Stanley Walden, MacArthur and Pulitzer Prize winner John Harbison and Pulitzer Prize winner Yehudi Wyner. She has presented contemporary music at many important venues, including in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Ruhr Piano Festival, in New York, Boston, Salzburg, at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau (France), at Yale University and as a soloist with orchestra for the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University.

Ya-Fei Chuang has recorded for AAM Records, ECM, Harmonia Mundi, Le Palais des Dégustateurs, Naxos, and New York Philomusica Records.  The Klavierfestival-Ruhr has released a number of her live recordings, including a solo recital distributed as a premium by Fono Forum Magazine in Germany.  Her recording of Hindemith chamber works was awarded a special prize by the International Record Review.

Ya-Fei Chuang is a Steinway Artist. 

Egyptian-American pianist Wael Farouk has performed internationally in such venues as the White Hall in St. Petersburg, Schumann’s House in Leipzig, and Carnegie Hall in New York, where his solo debut in 2013 was described as “absolutely masterful.”

Praised as a “formidable and magnificent pianist” by the New York Concert Review, Dr. Farouk is known for his groundbreaking performance projects. In 2018, along with the New Philharmonic Orchestra and Conductor Kirk Muspratt, he gave a historic performance of all five Beethoven Piano Concerti in a single concert (which was repeated on three consecutive nights). In the spring of 2021, he gave a performance of Rachmaninoff’s concerti Nos. 1, 2, and 3 in a single evening with the New Philharmonic Orchestra and Conductor Kirk Muspratt, which the Chicago Tribune music critic described as a “history- making concert.” The entirety of the performance was also broadcast on WFMT, Chicago’s Classical Music station. In the 2023-2024 season, Dr. Farouk performed the two Brahms piano concerti in one evening (repeated twice) with the New Philharmonic Orchestra and Conductor Kirk Muspratt.

For the 2025-27 season Dr. Farouk will perform the complete piano sonatas of Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Grieg, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Bartok in 8 recital programs, as well as Bartok's 2nd piano concerto.

Between 2014-2018, Dr. Farouk has performed 30 different recital programs featuring the complete solo piano works of Rachmaninoff and Brahms, as well as Brahms’s complete piano chamber music. Other programs included works by Chopin, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Ravel, Bolcom, Busoni, and Godowsky; the complete Transcendental Etudes by Liszt; and Bach’s The Art of Fugue and Beethoven’s Hammerklavier. He has also performed the complete piano concertos of Rachmaninoff, Brahms, and Beethoven. In 2017, he gave the African premiere of the monumental Busoni piano concerto with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Farouk commands a vast repertoire of more than 70 concertos and 60 solo programs, spanning from Scarlatti to Bolcom and including the complete piano works of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff, 10 solo recitals of Franz Liszt's music, as well as the complete sonatas of Prokofiev, Scriabin, and Schubert. He has appeared as a soloist with such orchestras as the North Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, the Saint-Etienne National Orchestra, the Academy of the Arts Orchestra, the Manhattan Symphony, and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, led by Christoph Mueller, Steven Lloyd, Patrick Fournilier, and Philippe Entremont, among others.

David Dubal described his 2013 debut solo album Russian Portraits (Carlock Records) as “piano playing that brings chills to the flesh, performed with a rare virtuoso technique.”

Dr. Farouk is on the piano faculty at the Manhattan School of Music in New York since 2021. Prior to that, Dr. Farouk was on the piano faculty at the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University in Chicago from 2012-2022.Dr. Farouk is author of The Complete Pianist: Advanced Virtuoso Technical Exercises. This five-volume collection provides professional pianists with the technical apparatus to master the most challenging repertoire as well as achieve and sustain pianistic health. He is also the founder and director of the Wael Farouk Virtual Piano Academy (WFVPA).

Dr. Farouk received his Bachelor of Music degree at the Cairo Conservatory as a student of Samir Aziz, Edgar Davelienadze, and Vsevolod Demidov, then came to the United States on a Fulbright Fellowship to study with Marilyn Neeley at the Catholic University of America. After receiving a Master of Music degree from Converse College as a student of Douglas Weeks, he continued his studies with Solomon Mikowsky at the Manhattan School of Music and the Chicago College of Performing Arts. He completed his studies with Daniel Epstein, receiving a DMA degree from Rutgers University.

Distinguished pianist Alexander Kobrin, has received wide acclaim for his emotional, technically inspired performances, placing him at the forefront of today’s performing musicians. 

He has appeared in recital at major halls worldwide, including Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, the Louvre Auditorium, la Salle Gaveau and Salle Cortot in Paris, Herkulesaal in Munich and Berlin Philharmonic Hall, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, National Auditorium in Madrid, Esplanade Hall in Singapore and the Sala Verdi in Milan.

Mr. Kobrin has been an active guest soloist with leading orchestras throughout his career, including the New York Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic, Russian National Orchestra, Orchestra Verdi, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Warsaw Philharmonic, Swedish Radio Orchestra, Deutsche Symphony, BBC Symphony Orchestra and English Chamber Orchestra. Conductors collaborations include Mikhail Pletnev, Mikhail Jurovsky, Sir Mark Elder,  James Conlon, Vassiliy Petrenko.

In addition to his international performing career, Mr. Kobrin has also been an active figure in music education for many years.  His masterclass schedule has included engagements with Conservatories in three continents, as well as jury participation for international piano competitions including the Cliburn, Busoni, Hamamatsu, Seoul and Michelangeli international piano competitions. After holding positions at Gnessin State Academy of Music and New York University, Mr. Kobrin joined the faculty of the renowned Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY in 2017. In the summer of 2026, he accepted the appointment of the Chair of Piano Department. 

Alexander Kobrin has released recordings on the Harmonia Mundi, Quartz, and Centaur labels, covering a wide swath of the piano literature to critical acclaim. His discography includes works by Haydn, Beethoven, (complete piano sonatas), Schubert, Schumann, Russian composers, alongside complete Hindemith violin and piano sonatas. 

Mr. Kobrin is the top prize winner of numerous international piano competitions including Van Cliburn, Hamamatsu, Chopin, Busoni and Glasgow.

Jeffrey Langford is recently retired from his position as Chair and Professor of Music History and as Associate Dean for Doctoral Studies at Manhattan School of Music.    

Dr. Langford is the author of several books including Berlioz: A Guide to Research (Garland Publishing), Evenings at the Opera: An Exploration of the Basic Repertoire (Amadeus Press), History of the Symphony: The Grand Genre (Routledge Press), and his latest book, Opera: A History of the Impossible Genre (also published by Routledge).  He has also published numerous articles in journals such as Musical Quarterly, Music and Letters, The Journal of Musicology, and others on interdisciplinary connections in Berlioz’s music. A special interest of Dr. Langford and has been the literary aspects of Italian and French opera in the nineteenth century with special emphasis on text setting in the French operas of Verdi. 

Dr. Langford has presented pre-concert lectures at the Metropolitan Opera for the past 15 years, has appeared as a guest lecturer at the New York Philharmonic, and has written program notes for the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center.  During past summers he has served as Administrative Director of Manhattan in the Mountains, a summer chamber music festival held in conjunction with the Catskill Mountain Foundation in Hunter, New York.

Pianist Robert Levin has performed heard through­­out the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. His solo engagements include the orchestras of Atlanta, Berlin, Birmingham, Bos­ton, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Mon­­­treal, Philadelphia, Toronto, Utah and Vienna on the Steinway with such conductors as Semyon Bychkov, James Conlon, Bernard Hai­tink, Sir Neville Mar­riner, Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen. On period pianos he has appeared with the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Baroque Soloists, the Handel & Haydn Society, the London Classical Players, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Orchestre Révo­lu­tion­naire et Ro­man­tique, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Chris­topher Hogwood, Ton Koopman, Emmanuel Krivine, Sir Charles Mac­kerras, Nicholas McGe­gan, and Sir Roger Nor­rington. Renowned for his impro­vised embel­lish­ments and cadenzas in Classical period repertoire, Robert Levin has made recordings for AABridge, DG Archiv, CRI, Decca/London, Deutsche Gram­­mophon, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, ECM, Hyperion, Klavierfestival Ruhr, Le Palais des Dégustateurs, New York Philomusica, Nonesuch, Philips and SONY Classical. These include the complete Mozart works for keyboard and orchestra for Decca Oiseau Lyre and the on period instruments with Chris­topher Hogwood, Richard Egarr, Bojan Čičič, Laurence Cummings, Ya-Fei Chuang, Louise Alder, and the Academy of An­cient Music; a Beethoven concerto cycle for DG Archiv with John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Roman­tique (including the world premiere recording of Beethoven’s arrangement of the Fourth Concerto for piano and string quintet); the complete Bach harpsichord concertos with Helmuth Rilling as well as the six English Suites (on piano) and both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier (on five keyboard instruments) as part of Hänssler’s 172-CD Edition Bach­akademie. His recording of the complete piano music of Henri Dutilleux was issued by ECM in 2009.  A passionate advocate of new music, he has commissioned and premiered a large number of works, including Joshua Fineberg’s Veils (2001), John Harbison’s Second Sonata (2003), Yehudi Wyner’s piano concerto Chiavi in mano (Pulitzer Prize, 2006), Bernard Rands’ Preludes (2007), Thomas Oboe Lee’s Piano Concerto (2007), and Hans Peter Türk’s Träume (2014).  Bridge Records released a CD that includes his performances of Bernard Rands’ Preludes and First Impromptu, and Hyperion has issued the complete Beethoven sonatas and variations for piano and ’cello with Steven Isserlis.  He has recorded his own completions of Mozart’s unfinished works for piano and violin with Gérard Poulet, the six Bach partitas on piano (Grand Prix International du Disque) and the complete Schubert piano trios with violinist Noah Bendix-Balgley and ’cellist Peter Wiley for Le Palais des Dégustateurs.  His recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas on Mozart’s piano has been released by ECM (Diapason d’Or de l’Année).

Robert Levin’s active career as a chamber musician includes a long association with the violist Kim Kashkashian and regular appearances with cellist Steven Isserlis. He performs frequently with his wife, pianist Ya-Fei Chuang, in duo recitals and with orchestra. From 2007 to 2016 he was Artistic Director of the Sarasota Music Festival, where he has been an artist faculty member since 1979.

In addition to his performing activities, Robert Levin is a noted theorist and musicologist and is the author of a number of articles and essays on Mozart.  A member of the Akademie für Mozartforschung, his comple­tions of Mozart fragments are published by Bärenreiter, Breitkopf & Härtel, Henle, Carus, Peters, and Wiener Urtext Edition.  They have been recorded and performed throughout the world. His completion of the Mozart Requiem stands together with that of Mozart’s assistant Süssmayr as the standard version, and his completion of the Mozart C-minor mass, commissioned by Carnegie Hall, was premiered there in January 2005 and has since been recorded and widely performed. Robert Levin was President of the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition (Leipzig, Germany) from 2002-2024.  He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He received the Bach Medal of the City of Leipzig in 2018 and the Golden Mozart Medal from the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg.  From 1993 to 2013 he was the Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of the Humanities at Harvard Uni­versity and is presently Visiting Professor at The Juilliard School, International Chair at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London, and Adjunct Professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg.

Anna Sunmin Park is a Korean pianist specializing in art song. She is the winner of the Jessie Kneisel Lieder Competition and a recipient of the Ann Clark Fehn Memorial Award for Best Pianist.

A passionate advocate for art song, Anna has organized and performed in numerous recitals, including From Diversity to Inclusion and To Keep My Love Alive with soprano Isabel Merat, as well as Mignon and Lorelei with soprano Hannah Moreno. She was also a finalist in the Federation of Art Song Competition with Isabel Merat and was selected as one of two collaborative pianists for the Brooklyn Art Song Society Young Artist Program 2026–2027.

Anna has participated in masterclasses with renowned artists including Elly Ameling, Helmut Deutsch, Graham Johnson, and Dawn Upshaw. She has also been selected for prestigious programs including the Aspen Music Festival and School (2026) and the Franz-Schubert-Institut (2024).

Anna also maintains a strong interest in contemporary music. She gave the premiere of Sunghyun Lee’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Zauberlehrling (2021), has frequently participated in new music ensembles including Academy 2021 at Seoul National University and Musica Nova at the Eastman School of Music, and has been actively involved in Tuesday Night New Music concerts at the New England Conservatory.

As a recipient of a top scholarship award, Anna is currently pursuing a Doctor of Music degree in Collaborative Piano at the New England Conservatory, where she studies with Cameron Stowe and Pei-Shan Lee. She holds degrees in Piano Performance from the Eastman School of Music and Seoul National University, where her former teachers include Hie-Yon Choi and Alexander Kobrin.

Internationally known pianist and teacher, Victor Rosenbaum, has received critical acclaim since his first Boston debut recital after joining the New England Conservatory faculty in 1967 when the Boston Globe wrote: Rosenbaum “makes up for all the drudgery the habitual concert-goer has to endure in the hope of finding the occasional real, right thing”.  His critical praise continues to this day. Describing his 2020 CD, “Brahms: The Last Piano Pieces” (Bridge), Glyn Pursglove of MusicWeb International said: “Rosenbaum’s account of of these pieces seems to me impeccable.  The whole disc is magisterial; a mature pianist bringing deep thought and empathy to a series of mature pieces which stand revealed, as clearly as I have heard, as masterpieces.  This will be the disc I turn to when I next want to hear any of these remarkable pieces”.  Since leaving New England Conservatory in 2020 after 53 consecutive years of teaching, Rosenbaum has had guest teaching and performing residencies in Puerto Rico, Israel, Japan, Korea, Austria, Bulgaria, and Taiwan, where he served as Visiting Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at National Taiwan Normal University from 2022 to 2025, as well as at conservatories and universities across the United States. He is also an Affiliated Artist on the faculty of MIT.

Over more than sixty years, Rosenbaum has concertized widely as soloist and chamber musician in the United States, Europe, Israel, Brazil, Russia, Japan, China and Taiwan, appearing in such prestigious halls as Tully Hall in New York and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. As a chamber music performer, he has collaborated with major artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Leonard Rose, Paul Katz, Laurence Lesser, Arnold Steinhardt, Robert Mann, Joseph Silverstein, James Buswell, Malcolm Lowe, Walter Trampler, Leslie Parnas, Kim Kashkashian and the Brentano, Borromeo, and Cleveland String Quartets, and was a member of two trios: The Wheaton Trio and The Figaro Trio.  Rosenbaum has played and/or taught at many summer festivals, among them Tanglewood, the Rockport Chamber Music Festival, Kfar Blum and Tel Hai (in Israel), Yellow Barn, Kneisel Hall (Blue Hill), Musicorda, Masters de Pontlevoy (France), the Heifetz Institute, the International Keyboard Institute and Festival in New York, the International Music Seminar in Vienna, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Festival at Walnut Hill School, the Puerto Rico International Piano Festival,The Art of the Piano Festival in Cincinnati, the Atlantic Music Festival, Piano Texas, the Adamant Music School, the Lancaster International Piano Festival, the Prima Music Foundation Summer Academy, and the Eastern Music Festival, where he headed the piano department for five years.

Recital appearances have brought him to Chicago, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Taipei, Vienna, Beijing, St. Petersburg (Russia), Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and New York, among others.  In addition to his absorption in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in particular Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, and Brahms), Rosenbaum has performed and given premieres of works by many 20th and 21st Century composers, including John Harbison, John Heiss, Peter Westergaard, Norman Dinerstein, Arlene Zallman, Donald Harris, Daniel Pinkham, Miriam Gideon, Stephen Albert, and many others.  A musician of diverse talents, Rosenbaum is also a composer and has frequently conducted in the Boston area and beyond.

Rosenbaum, who studied with Elizabeth Brock and Martin Marks while growing up in  Indianapolis, and went on to study with Rosina Lhevinne at the Aspen Festival and Leonard Shure in New York (while earning degrees at Brandeis University and Princeton), has become a renowned teacher himself.  Rosenbaum’s students have established teaching and performing careers in the US and abroad, and have won top competition prizes including, most recently, Aristo Sham’s Gold Medal in the 2025 Van Cliburn Competition, and  in such competitions as the Young Concerts Artists, Charles Wadsworth International Competition, New Orleans International Competition, Casagrande International Piano Competition, Gina Bachauer Competition, and the New York International Competition, among others. During his long tenure on the faculty of New England Conservatory, he chaired its piano department for more than a decade, and was also Chair of Chamber Music. On the faculty of Mannes School of Music in New York from 2003-2017, he has also been Visiting Professor of Piano at the Eastman School of Music, a guest teacher at Juilliard, and presents lectures, workshops, and master classes for teachers’ groups and schools both in the U. S. and abroad, including at London’s Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, and Guildhall School, the conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow, Beijing Central Conservatory, Shanghai Conservatory, the Toho School in Tokyo, Tokyo Ondai, Seoul National University, most major schools in Taiwan, and other institutions such as the Menuhin School near London, and the Jerusalem Music Center.   Rosenbaum’s sixteen years as Director and President of the Longy School of Music (1985-2001) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, transformed the school into a full-fledged degree granting conservatory as well as a thriving community music school. 

In addition to his Brahms disc, Rosenbaum’s recordings on the Bridge and Fleur de Son labels include a Mozart CD, three Schubert discs, one of which was described as “a poignant record of human experience”,and two recordings of Beethoven, one of which the American Record Guide named as among the top classical recordings of 2020. The New York Times put it succinctly after his performance at Tully Hall: Rosenbaum “could not have been better”.  And a review in the Boston Globe summed up the appeal of Rosenbaum’s playing: “Fervor and Gentleness Combined”.

“…luxurious, beautifully sculpted performances”

— THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 Internationally recognized as one of the world's finest quartets, the American String Quartet has spent decades honing the luxurious sound for which it is famous. The Quartet celebrated its 45th anniversary in 2019, and, in its years of touring, has performed in all fifty states and has appeared in the most important concert halls worldwide. The group’s presentations of the complete quartets of Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Bartók, and Mozart have won widespread critical acclaim, and their MusicMasters Complete Mozart String Quartets, performed on a matched quartet set of instruments by Stradivarius, are widely considered to have set the standard for this repertoire.  

Recent seasons featured performances of the Quartet’s major project together with the National Book Award-winning author Phil Klay and the poet Tom Sleigh, which offers a groundbreaking program combining music and readings that examines the effects of war. The Quartet also collaborated with the renowned author Salman Rushdie in a work for narrator and quartet by the film composer Paul Cantelon built around Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence. These tremendously imaginative collaborations cement the American String Quartet’s reputation as one of the most adventurous and fearless string quartets performing today, as comfortable with the groundbreaking as with the traditional. 

The Quartet's diverse activities have also included numerous international radio and television broadcasts, including a recent recording for the BBC; tours of Asia; and performances with the New York City Ballet, the Montreal Symphony, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Recent highlights include performances of an all-sextet program with Roberto and Andrès Díaz, many tours of South America, and performances of the complete Beethoven cycle of string quartets at the Cervantes Festival in Mexico and the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel.  

The American’s additional extensive discography can be heard on the Albany, CRI, MusicMasters, Musical Heritage Society, Nonesuch, and RCA labels. Most recently the group released "Schubert's Echo," which pairs Schubert's monumental last quartet with works bearing its influence by Second Viennese masters Alban Berg and Anton Webern. This repertoire posits that the creative line from the First to the Second Viennese Schools is continuous – and evident when these works are heard in the context of each other.  

As champions of new music, the American has given numerous premieres, including George Tsontakis’s Quartet No. 7.5, “Maverick,” Richard Danielpour's Quartet No. 4, and Curt Cacioppo's a distant voice calling. The premiere of Robert Sirota’s American Pilgrimage was performed around the U.S. in the cities the work celebrates. The Quartet premiered Tobias Picker’s String Quartet No. 2 in New York City in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Manhattan School of Music.  

Formed when its original members were students at The Juilliard School, the American String Quartet’s career began with the group winning both the Coleman Competition and the Naumburg Award in the same year.  Resident quartet at the Aspen Music Festival since 1974 and at the Manhattan School of Music in New York since 1984, the American has also served as resident quartet at the Taos School of Music, the Peabody Conservatory, and the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.