“The Calidore String Quartet of New York won the $100,000 grand prize at the inaugural M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition at the University of Michigan on Thursday night,” reports Mark Stryker in Thursday’s (5/19) Detroit Free Press. “The prize is the most lucrative award in the world for chamber music. ‘My head is spinning,’ said the quartet’s violist Jeremy Berry … ‘This will give us a chance to sustain a career.’ The Calidore quartet, which just completed a two-year residency at Stony Brook University of New York and whose members average 27 years of age, beat out … the Kenari Quartet, a saxophone ensemble from Indiana University in Bloomington, and Yarn/Wire, a quartet of two pianists and two percussionists based in New York. … In addition to the cash, the group wins performances in coming seasons on six important arts series in America and Germany, including the University Musical Society in Ann Arbor in 2016-17. M-Prize is the brainchild of Aaron Dworkin, who last year took over as dean of the School of Music, Theater and Dance at U-M. Dworkin [is] best known as … founder of the Detroit-based Sphinx Competition for minority string players.”
Posted May 20, 2016
