Faculty Recital: Borromeo String Quartet

Artist(s)

Nicholas Kitchen, violin
Kristopher Tong, violin
Melissa Reardon, viola
Yeesun Kim, cello

The Borromeo String Quartet, formed in 1989, has had a rich and multi-faceted career performing all around the world.  They have performed in many of the world's great concerts halls: the Berlin Philharmonie, the Zurich Tonhalle, Dvorak Hall in Prague, Wigmore Hall in London, the Opera Bastille in Paris, Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, the Oriental Arts Center in Shanghai and the Seoul Arts Center in Korea.  They have worked extensively with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress, and have over many years presented quartet cycles such as the complete quartets of Beethoven and Shostakovich at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  They studied for their Artist Diploma at the New England Conservatory of Music and upon graduation in 1992 they were asked to become the faculty String-Quartet-in-Residence at the Conservatory.  They have fulfilled this role with great enthusiasm for over 30 years now.  The Borromeo Quartet has also had a long-term involvement with the Taos School of Music and they now serve as faculty String-Quartet-in-Residence at the Heifetz International Music Institute where first violinist Nicholas Kitchen is the Artistic Director.  For many years the Borromeo Quartet performed at the Spoleto Festivals in both Charleston and Italy and they have also performed at Tanglewood and Ravinia and at each of these places they also gave special presentations about their unique research into the manuscripts of Beethoven.

The Borromeo Quartet has received numerous awards.  They won top prizes in the Evian International String Quartet Competition, won the Young Concert Artists Auditions, and received the Cleveland Quartet Award, the Avery Fischer Career Grant and Lincoln Center's Martin E. Siegel Award.  They were Ensemble in Residence for NPR's Performance Today and have worked extensively with WGBH in Boston.

The Borromeo Quartet is known as the first professional ensemble to use computers to read music in concerts and they started doing this in 2007 in order to always work from the full score.  This use of computers also made it natural for them to bring sources such as composer's manuscripts into their rehearsal process, and this has proved very inspiring to the group in their work with many great composers - Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg and Bartók, to mention just a few.

The Borromeo Quartet invented and offered for many years a program called Living Archive where audience members could order CDs and DVDs of the live concert they just heard.  Recently this initiative has transformed into CD offerings as well as Web presentations some of which delve into some of the more fascinating aspects of their work with the manuscripts of Beethoven. 

Through the transcriptions of first violinist Nicholas Kitchen the Borromeo Quartet has brought a great deal of the music of J.S. Bach into the repertoire of their quartet.  They have performed and recorded both books of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier (Book 1 as a CD, Book 2 as a web presentation) and they perform the Goldberg Variations and numerous organ works.  They have also worked with a great array of contemporary composers, including Gunther Schuller, John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Michael Gandolfi, Kati Agócs and Mehmet Sanlıkol.