Thank you to munich.tv for featuring Sirius Quartet and the 2023 Progressive Chamber Music Festival at Milla Club. We are very grateful for the interest! For footage from the story, featuring interviews with quartet member Gregor Huebner, and Milla Club owner Gerd Baumann, Click HERE.
After 30 years, violist Ron Lawrence- the founding member of Sirius Quartet- is stepping away from the quartet to pursue other projects. He thanks all of the previous quartet members and collaborators over the years for their joyful music-making and is pleased to leave the quartet in such capable hands.
We'd like to thank Ron for all of his years spent forging new paths forward for the creative string playing community in NYC and beyond and he will forever be a part of the Sirius family. Ron will be joining us for a handful of select dates in the US in May with pianist Richie Beirach, details forthcoming.
With Ron's departure, would also like to announce that we are excited to have Sunjay Jayaram joining us as our new violist!
Sunjay is a violist, violinist and oud player who enjoys playing and improvising in a wide variety of styles and genres including jazz, Carnatic music and hip hop in addition to traditional and contemporary classical music.
Originally from South Carolina, Sunjay moved to New York to pursue an undergraduate degree in violin performance at NYU with Laura Hamilton and is currently a graduate student at the Mannes School of Music studying with Jennifer Koh. He has worked with a wide variety of groups and ensembles in NYC such as the American Composers Orchestra, 8-Bit Big Band, Westside Chamber Players and P’an, a global traditional music collective. Sunjay has also worked with musicians and directors including Ted Sperling, Bobby Sanabria, David Bloom and others.
From Sunjay:
"Hello Sirius fans and supporters! I am very grateful to my new friends Gregor Huebner, Fung Chern Hwei and Jeremy Harman for allowing me to contribute to Sirius Quartet's distinct voice. I believe strongly in the energy of the quartet's music and I look forward to adding my own musical and creative energy to the band!"
SIRIUS QUARTET @ BARBÉS, SATURDAY 3/11- CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS
We are thrilled to have the opportunity to travel abroad once again! This time we will be joining the brilliant jazz pianist Richie Beirach for 2 concerts as part of Jazzfest Bonn on August 27th, 2021. Click here for more info. Hope to see you there!
This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
We are excited to announce our latest collaboration with PARMA Records and a group of fantastic composers is out!!
Playing on the Edge 2 is our second recording in a series of brand new string quartet music by a stylistically diverse pool of up and coming composers. Thank you to Bruce Babcock, Dayton Kinney, Roger Fong, Daniel Burwasser, John Summers, and Gregory J. Harris for your excellent compositions, it was a pleasure to work with you all and record your music!
“PLAYING ON THE EDGE 2 follows up Navona Records' first Gramophone-lauded album in this series for string quartet. Like the first installment, the award-winning Sirius Quartet plays the entire catalogue to perfection.
Bruce Babcock opens the album with Watcher of the Sky, a piece commissioned to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the birth of American astronomer George Ellery Hale. Four movements chronicle the astronomer's achievements throughout the course of his career: the listener follows the rise from humble beginnings to great discoveries, always enveloped in a sense of marvel at the infinity of outer space. The Canary Who Sang by Dayton Kinney is a politically-inspired piece drawing parallels between the historical canaries in coal mines and today's whistleblowers: a musical testament on how one voice can potentially disrupt a larger society.
Happiness, anger, sorrow and joy are the underlying emotions of Roger Fong's Variations on Emotions. Derived from a Chinese saying that it is these emotions that make up life, Fong examines the nature of these heterogeneous sentiments with great accuracy. Daniel Burwasser's Puck's Game is a cinematically illustrative characterization of Shakespeare's mischievous sprite Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rhythmic and exciting, the work is somewhat reminiscent of Shostakovich, but more light-hearted and humorous.
The first movement of String Quartet by John Summers is a meditation on sound, with thick harmonic layers and long, luscious melodic lines. The eclectic Landscapes by Gregory J. Harris round off the album. Careful to give every note, every idea ample space, the three-movement work exploits the tension between grandeur and intimacy – and the string quartet setup is the perfect conjunction of both.
PLAYING ON THE EDGE 2 is a solid follow-up to the first installment; and since it skillfully continues the thematic arc of the first album, one might well be able to expect a third.”
We are excited to announce the release of our latest recording of composer Hillary Tann’s hauntingly beautiful work, And The Snow Did Lie. We are grateful to be able to present new music to you during this difficult time and we hope that this recording can bring you some peace and solace as we weather this pandemic together. Navona has put together a wonderfully-shot video of the recording session as well as the lithographs that served as the composer’s inspiration to accompany the piece, which you can watch HERE.
The album can be purchased and/or streamed HERE.
This from Navona Records website:
New from Navona Records comes AND THE SNOW DID LIE, composed by Hilary Tann and performed by Sirius Quartet. Tann, a Welsh-born composer living in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains was inspired to write this commissioned work by a series of illustrations from the classic French-Canadian novel, Le Survenant. These images are included with the release of this digital single.
The music of AND THE SNOW DID LIE is broken into three movements, each depicting a season in the bleak northern landscape. Each of these is further broken into distinct sections. The first movement evokes the wasteland of late autumn with an murmuring drone pierced by the shrill voice of decay. The music develops to demonstrate both moments of startling intensity and deep tenderness. The second movement imagines the gentle snowfall of winter. Here, especially, the Sirius Quartet exhibits their sensitivity to the silences between the notes. Finally, the work concludes with a third movement that conjures up the floods of springtime with shivering tremolos, lyrical lines, and echoes of the previous textures.
AND THE SNOW DID LIE is a multimedia artwork to be appreciated by both the eyes and the ears. The powerful combination of Tann's expressive lyricism paired with Bergeron's master-lithography performed by the formidable skill and precision of the Sirius Quartet make this new digital single an event not to be missed.
2020 is upon us and we hope yours if off to a great start! We are thrilled to be making both our Carnegie Hall and Wigmore Hall debuts this fall, the latter with German soprano-extraordinaire Marlis Petersen in a brand-new collaboration in takes both Marlis and the quartet out of our comfort zones to create a truly unique mix of progressive chamber music! More specifics to come.
We will be returning to Germany in both May and November and touring extensively around the county, but in the meantime look out for us in NYC in March and Massachusetts in April! Check out the SHOWS section of the website for more info (much more to come). We hope to see you at a concert this year!
We are psyched for the 2nd annual Progressive Chamber Music Festival in Munich! In the same spirit of it’s NYC Counterpart, the 2019 PCMF features a diverse array of absolutely killer artists who blur genre-lines and and embrace cross-pollination as an absolute essential ingredient in the creation of forward-thinking music and art. We have the pleasure of performing on the 2nd night alongside the fantastic harpist Evelyn Huber, who we will be on tour with throughout November. We hope to see you there!
MORE INFO: https://www.milla-club.de/progressive-chamber-music-festival-tag-1/
Evelyn Huber & Sirius Quartet: Para un Mejor Mundo
out NOW on GLM Music
ORDER HERE
It all adds up to a magical, dazzling kaleidoscope of musical possibilities, just as the extraordinary, unconditional encounter of a string quartet with a harp provides. Sometimes delicately elaborate tone braids, sometimes spontaneous dialogues between the instruments, sometimes elegiac impressions, sometimes dynamic rhythm attacks. A sound universe that has not yet been heard like that. And the new, indeed, often has what it takes to make the world a little better – “para un mejor mundo”.
Last fall, we had the pleasure of starting a new project with the fantastic Munich-based harpist Evelyn Huber. After a really nice run of concerts in Germany, it became clear that the project needed to continue and so we immediately started making plans for an album together. In May, we spent a week together at one of our favorite spots, Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, Germany and Para un Mejor Mundo is the result. The album is a mixture of music composed by Evelyn and members of the quartet, as well as some music composed specifically for the 5 of us by some very accomplished friends. The album has been released through the German label GLM Music, and can be ordered HERE. Evelyn plays, improvises, and writes beautifully, and we love the pairing of harp with string quartet. We will be supporting the album's release with a German tour in November, including concerts in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, and Bonn among others.
New World, our latest album, has dropped! The album is available via Zoho Music as well as all digital download and streaming platforms. Read more about the album below:
SIRIUS QUARTET: NEW WORLD
Both a charged reaction to recent political events and a celebration of the perserverance of hope and spirit, New World features 9 new compositions and arrangements from members of the quartet.
On August 23, Sirius Quartet releases New World on ZOHO Records. Called an ensemble that “works comfortably at the intersection of post-minimalist classical composition and post-bop jazz” by the Detroit Free Press, the quartet’s visceral compositions and arrangements provide ample space for improvisation. The politically-charged and topical album explores themes of immigration, discrimination, and being an agent of change.
The title track “New World, Nov. 9, 2016” was the Grand Prize winner for the New York Philharmonic’s “New World Initiative” composition competition in 2017. Composer/violinist Gregor Huebner balances idyllic and hopeful themes of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (“New World” Symphony) with the fiercer passages found in the Shostakovich String Quartet No.8 that allude to tensions between the composer and the Soviet Union. “With two immigrant violinists, we in the quartet feel that it’s important to create music that speaks to the moment in which we live and gives hope,” says composer Huebner.
Huebner’s “#STILL” is based on the devastating song “Strange Fruit,” first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. Eighty years later and institutionalized racism remains endemic. Composer/violinist Fung Chern Hwei describes the opening work, “Beside the Point” as his “declaration of struggle against discrimination.” Cellist/composer Jeremy Harman’s “Currents” maintains an often vague sense of menace throughout, prodding the listener out of any complacency. The Beatles’ iconic “Eleanor Rigby” and Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” both arranged by Huebner, showcase the group’s fierce improvisational acumen. Recorded in Germany over two years, New World is the quartet’s first full-length since 2016’s Paths Become Lines. The album is both an impassioned lament for the state of a nation and beyond, and a beautiful and hopeful call to action.
Yet another video from our session at Bauer Studio in Ludwigsburg, Germany, This is a new piece of Chern Hwei's, Beside the Point (...and you thought is was over). Big thanks to Phillipe Ohl and Johannes Wohlleben for the video and audio work. Check it out HERE.
We recently got to spend some quality time in Bauer Studio in Ludwigsburg, Germany, recording some new material that will be on the next Sirius record. Percussionist and videographer Phillipe Ohl did a killer job of capturing this rendition of Gregor's latest piece, New World: November 9th, 2016. Check it out HERE.
Thanks to Frank Oteri and his blog New Music Box for featuring Sirius Quartet in a recent article in which we discuss the idea of "progressive chamber music" and how we define ourselves both as a quartet and as creative musicians in the 21st century.
https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/progressive-chamber-music/
We are absolutely thrilled to announce that our violinist Gregor Huebner has won the Grand Prize in the New York Philharmonic’s New World Initiative Composition Challenge! The contest was open to all NYC-based composers with the challenge being to create an original composition based on one or more themes from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, to celebrate both the 175th anniversary of the NY Phil as well as their 1893 premiere of the work.
Some words from Gregor:
“I am deeply honored to be the recipient of the Grand Prize for New York Philharmonic’s New World Initiative Composition Challenge for my composition “New World, Nov 9. 2016.” The contest winners will be recognized at the Concerts in the Parks on June 14, 2017.
I entered the composition contest to create “a work that contained or referenced themes from Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World.”
I began composing the piece the day after the presidential election in November 2016 and the influence of that historic moment is definitely reflected in the composition. It’s quite a different musical view of the New World for an immigrant in Dvorak’s time and an immigrant like myself today. References from Dvořák and Shostakovich are embedded in a musical journey throughout the rich and international cultural world of New York City.”
During its 175th anniversary season (2016–17), the New York Philharmonic will celebrate New York City and its role as home to the Orchestra and as an adopted home for many. The New World Initiative (NWI) evolves from a major event in the Philharmonic’s history: the 1893 World Premiere of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World — the first major work composed in New York that became immediately and enduringly popular. The complete work represents a yearning for new beginnings while also looking back to where we came from. Through the NWI, the Philharmonic will engage with New Yorkers citywide by making the New World Symphony a cultural touchstone for as many New Yorkers as possible.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bDNXK2q4Buc?ecver=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
New Video! Check out Gregor's arrangement of Eleanor Rigby, filmed at the Alchemical Lab in NYC earlier this year. Thanks to Simon C.F. You and Suzuki for the shooting and editing and Rozhan Razman at Riro Music for audio recording and mixing.