THE VERMEER QUARTET

Shmuel Ashkenasi (violin)
Mathias Tacke (violin)
Richard Young (viola)
Marc Johnson (cello)

With performances in practically every major city in North America, Europe, and Australia, the Vermeer Quartet, which has achieved an international stature as one of the world’s finest chamber music ensembles, will mark its final season of touring in North America in 06-07 season. Since its formation in 1969 at Marlboro, the Vermeer has performed at many other prestigious festivals including Tanglewood, Aldeburgh, Mostly Mozart, Aspen, Bath, Lucerne, Norfolk, South Bank, Taos, Flanders, Albuquerque, Stresa, Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein, Santa Fe, Edinburgh, Daniel, Great Woods, Spoleto, Ravinia, and the Casals Festival.

The ensemble's recent performances include chamber music societies in Calgary, Philadelphia, Columbus, and San Antonio, as well as on the chamber music series of Notre Dame, Pennsylvania State University, University of Washington, and Ohio University, among others. The Vermeer recently performed the Beethoven cycle under the auspices of Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music, and over a six year period performed the Beethoven cycle at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The group tours Europe at least twice each season, and returned to Japan for the fourth time in six years in the spring of 2005 and will do so again for a final time in the fall of 2007. In 2003 they received their second Grammy nomination for their CD of the Shostakovich and Schnittke piano quintets with Boris Berman on the Naxos label. Their recording of the six Bartok quartets was released by Naxos in May of 2005 and received their third Grammy nomination.

Now living in Chicago, the members of the Vermeer Quartet have been on the Resident Artist Faculty of Northern Illinois University at DeKalb since 1970. They are also Fellows of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England, where they have presented master classes since 1978. For over two decades they have spent part of each summer on the coast of Maine as the featured ensemble for Bay Chamber Concerts.

The Vermeer Quartet offers an impressive variety of repertoire, including not only the standard classics, but many less familiar compositions as well. They have also presented many new works for string quartet, a number of which were written for them. Their recordings include the complete quartets of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Bartok, plus works by Schubert, Dvorak, Shostakovich, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Schnittke, Verdi, and Brahms. Their Grammy-nominated CD of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ has been broadcast to over 60 million people throughout the world, thus reaching far beyond the traditional chamber music audience.

For more information about the Vermeer Quartet,
please visit their web site at www.vermeerqt.com.