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All season long the Schneider Concerts is offering simultaneous online broadcasts (livestreams) of the concerts we're presenting at The New School.
The season closes with the Katarina String Quartet, 2025 Grand Prize winner of the Fischoff Competition. Selected by curating/performing ensemble Ulysses Quartet, the Katarina will perform works by Vivian Fung and Franz Joseph Haydn, and be joined by the Ulysses Quartet in a performance of Felix Mendelssohn's Octet.
Vivian Fung: String Quartet No. 5 "Spiraling" (2022)—New York City Premiere
Franz Joseph Haydn: String Quartet in C Major, Op. 50, No. 2 (1787)
Felix Mendelssohn: Octet in E-flat, Op. 20 (1825)—with members of the Ulysses Quartet
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This concert will be approximately 1 hour and 40 minutes, including intermission
Livestreams are offered with pay-what-you-wish access.
That means you can choose to register for a free ticket or pay up to $20 (the cost of in-person attendance at our concerts). It's up to you! No judgement - we want as many people as possible to enjoy the music.
Those who register for the livestream will receive a viewing link 24 hours before the concert.
The link will become active about 15 minutes before the live concert begins.
This event is part of the Schneider Concerts 2025-26 season — 6 mainstage concerts featuring exceptional emerging ensembles, plus pre-concert talks, livestreams, and free short programs at community partner venues.
Explore the season here.
Presented by New School Concerts
Grand Prize winner of the 2025 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, the Katarina String Quartet has quickly distinguished itself as one of North America’s most compelling young ensembles. The tightly-knit and community focused ensemble currently serves as the Graduate Resident String Quartet at The Juilliard School, where they explore all chamber music, from contemporary and canonized works to folk tunes. The KSQ’s 2025/26 season includes tours in the United States, Dubai, and Europe; performances in and around New York City, including at Carnegie Hall; and a residency at the Avaloch Farm Institute. Previous seasons have included CMS Kids, IMS Prussia Cove, and MISQA. The KSQ are recent ProQuartet Prize and Drimnin String Quartet Academy Prize winners in the 2025 Wigmore Hall String Quartet Competition; previously, they were Gold Medal and BIPOC prizewinners of the 2024 St. Paul Chamber Music Competition.
The KSQ was founded in 2022 at McGill University under the tutelage of André Roy. Since then, the KSQ has worked extensively with members of the Juilliard, Alban Berg, Danel, Dover, and Pacifica Quartets, and has participated in prestigious programs such as IMS Prussia Cove and McGill International String Quartet Academy (MISQA). The KSQ takes its name from luthier Katarina Guarneri, wife of violin-maker Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu. Scholars believe that she worked on her husband’s violins during the most productive years of his career. Inspired by Katarina, the KSQ celebrates the countless people and communities behind the canonized figureheads of classical music that contribute to the art we enjoy. Known for their personable concert presentations and community leadership, they regularly perform in community centers around New York City as recipients of Juilliard’s Gluck Fellowship.
Founded at The New School in 1957 as New School Concerts with the mission to offer outstanding, affordable chamber music, the series was renamed in 1993 to honor its founding artistic director, Alexander “Sasha” Schneider—violinist, conductor, and member of the Budapest String Quartet.
The Schneider Concerts commitment to accessible, excellent chamber music still is anchored in affordable pricing, but now also includes support for early-career artists, outreach to older New Yorkers, and a strong commitment to accessibility and inclusion. The series now actively welcomes artists and audiences from all backgrounds, with programming that honors and celebrates tradition and embraces innovation.
Director Rohana Elias-Reyes is supported by an music advisory committee of esteemed musicians: John Dalley, Pamela Frank, Jaime Laredo, Cho-Liang Lin, Anthony McGill, Kurt Muroki, Tara O’Connor, and Arnold Steinhardt.
Notable series alumni who made debuts and early career appearances on the series include Peter Serkin, Yo-Yo Ma, and the Guarneri, Dover, and Calidore string quartets. More recently, we've presented the New York debuts of the Viano, Balourdet, Isidore, and Ivalas string quartets.
At last, Beethoven felt ready to enter the weighty string quartet medium and offer his first set of quartets for publication in 1801. Interestingly, the first quartet he wrote chronologically is known to us as Op. 18 No. 3, in D Major, and this F Major Quartet, written second, was placed at the beginning of the set. Whether or not this was an intentional choice, the piece presents rather well what the rest of this set and the later works would end up featuring: a radical evolution of the quartet medium he inherited from the reins of Haydn and Mozart. This was all a product of Beethoven’s painstaking and probing working process unsurpassed by any composer before or since.
The work begins with a fragment of a melody played in unison, followed by a mysterious silence. The fragment returns, more searchingly into another silence, only to be completed in a classical phrase structure. Immediately, there is another surprise as the phrase repeats as a forte outburst. The motive that comprises the opening phrase is a monorhythm which repeats in the movement literally hundreds of times, yet much like Beethoven’s future Fifth Symphony, its effect only enhances the energy and drama of the work. The first forte outburst serves as the precursor of many sudden dynamic contrasts, the motive acting as the thread stringing the music tightly together through all upheavals.
An early draft of this quartet which Beethoven sent to his trusted friend, violinist and theologian Karl Amenda, is a unique vantage point into Beethoven’s working process and coming of age. While the overall thematic structure remains the same as in the final version, the dizzying amount of detail-oriented changes the piece underwent is shocking to compare. The most important revelation from the earlier version is Beethoven’s clear handwritten indications that the pathos-laden and dramatic slow movement is meant to correspond to the events of the tomb scene from Romeo and Juliette. With this discovery, one can only wonder if other abstract instrumental compositions of Beethoven, an ardent Shakespeare reader, were also meant to have programmatic ties. However, this is the only such example from his whole output that is explicitly stated, and Beethoven felt as though his music should speak for itself in the listener’s imagination. Even without knowing any programmatic connections, this movement would have been most striking for a listener of the era, especially with the melodramatic climaxes and painfully pronounced pauses.
Following this Adagio, the last two movements serve largely as comic relief, with an especially virtuosic violin passage in the Scherzo’s trio catapulting the energy to a feverish height. The mood returns to playfulness throughout the satisfying finale movement, culminating in a jolly bon voyage tune combined with the main theme at the close.
String Quartet No. 5 “Spiraling” was written as a reflection on the tumultuous year that was 2021. With a relentless series of local and international incidents, including the storming of the Capitol, widening political divisions, and culture wars; forests burning throughout the western United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia; coups and assassinations in Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Haiti; and new and ever more virulent COVID variations, the list continued to spiral out of control as the year went on and took a tremendous emotional toll on me. It seemed that the only constant in our world was change, continual change.
Reflecting that continual change, the quartet is a tour de force work in one movement that is constantly moving and morphing from one figure to the next, often spiraling in circular motions repeating patterns of arpeggios or chords. Like a musical kaleidoscope, the quartet uses one motive from the very beginning but it weaves in and out in different colors and emotions, from the angst-filled beginning, through a more gentle transition with use of harmonics as color, to a playful section that is sporadic and eventually grooves to a beat. In addition to the opening motivic figure, a central melodic idea permeates the piece and closes the piece as a lament, filled with both sorrow and hope as it seeks to reassure.
- Vivian Fung
Thank you to our audience, Jessie Montgomery, The New School, the Schneider Concert Series, and the New England Conservatory for allowing us to perform for you today. It is a pleasure to play these works and a very special occasion to perform “Strum” by the Mannes School of Music’s newest violin and composition faculty member, Jessie Montgomery.
— Notes by the Balourdet String Quartet, except where otherwise noted.
Cho-Liang Lin was born in Taiwan. A neighbor’s violin studies convinced this 5-year old boy to do the same. At the age twelve, he moved to Sydney to further his studies with Robert Pikler, a student of Jenő Hubay. After playing for Itzhak Perlman in a master class, the 13-year old boy decided that he must study with Mr. Perlman’s teacher, Dorothy DeLay. At the age fifteen, Lin traveled alone to New York and auditioned for the Juilliard School and spent the next six years working with Ms DeLay.
A concert career was launched in 1980 with Lin’s debut playing the Mendelssohn Concerto with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta . He has since performed as soloist with virtually every major orchestra in the world. His busy schedule on stage around the world continues to this day. However, his wide ranging interests have led him to diverse endeavors. At the age of 31, his alma mater, Juilliard School, invited Lin to become faculty. In 2006, he was appointed professor at Rice University. He is currently music director of La Jolla SummerFest and the Hong Kong International Chamber Music Festival. Ever so keen about education, he was music director of the Taiwan National Symphony music camp and youth orchestra for four years.
In his various professional capacities, Cho-Liang Lin has championed composers of our time. His efforts to commission new works have led a diverse field of composers to write for him. The list includes John Harbison, Christopher Rouse, Tan Dun, John Williams, Steven Stucky, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Bright Sheng, Paul Schoenfield, Lalo Schifrin, Joan Tower and many more. Recently, he was soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Toronto Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Nashville Symphony and Royal Philharmonic. He is a member of the New School Concerts music advisory committee.
Lin performs on the 1715 Stradivari named “Titian” or a 2000 Samuel Zygmuntowicz. His many concerto, recital and chamber music recordings on Sony Classical, Decca, BIS, Delos and Ondine can be heard on Spotify or Naxos.com. His albums have won Gramophone Record Of The Year, Grammy nominations and Penguin Guide Rosettes.
Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).
Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, ballet, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn… (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Passage (2019) a ballet commissioned by Dance Theatre of Harlem, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Caught by the Wind (2016) for the Albany Symphony and the American Music Festival.
The New York Philharmonic has selected Montgomery as one of the featured composers for their Project 19, which marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting equal voting rights in the United States to women. Other forthcoming works include a cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto, to be premiered by Hilary Hahn; a cello concerto for Thomas Mesa jointly commissioned by Carnegie Hall, New World Symphony, and The Sphinx Organization; and a new orchestral work for the National Symphony.
A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and recent member of the Catalyst Quartet, she continues to maintain an active performance career as a violinist appearing regularly with her improvising duo Big dog little dog with bassist Eleonore Oppenheim.
Montgomery’s teachers and mentors include Sally Thomas, Ann Setzer, Alice Kanack, Joan Tower, Derek Bermel, Mark Suozzo, Ira Newborn, and Laura Kaminsky. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a Graduate Fellow in Music Composition at Princeton University. Montgomery is on both the composition and violin faculty at Mannes.