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The Cassatt String Quartet was founded in 1985. Originally the first participants in Juilliard's Young Artists Quartet Program, the Quartet has gone on to win many teaching fellowships and awards and has toured internationally. Named after impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, the quartet is based in New York City.
The Cassatt Quartet has performed at New York's Alice Tully Hall and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Theater, the Kennedy Center and Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Internationally, it has taken the stage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Maeda Hall in Tokyo, the American Academy in Rome, the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Festival de Música de Cámera in San Miguel de Allende. Composers whose works the quartet has performed include Tina Davidson, Jay Reise, Andy Tierstien, Joan Tower, and Dan Welcher. The acclaimed quartet has built a reputation for being a champion of work by living composers.[1]
Named three times in The New Yorker magazine's Best Of The Year CD Selection, they have recorded for the Koch, Naxos, New World, Albany and CRI Labels.
The Cassatt Quartet was founded in 1985 by four young artists at Juilliard who were inspired by the work of artist Mary Cassatt. It won the Coleman Chamber Music Competition one year later, and two top prizes in the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 1989. At that time the quartet consisted of Laura Goldberg and Muneko Otani, violins; Sarah Adams, viola; and Anna Cholakian, cello. Founding members included cellist Anna Cholakian and violinist Laura J. Goldberg. Goldberg went on to join the Juilliard pre-college teaching faculty and later left the quartet.[2] She later founded Arts Ahimsa, a group that uses music and the arts to promote non-violence.
In 1991 the quartet, composed of Muneko Otani, Laura Goldberg (violin); Michiko Oshima (viola); Anna Cholakian (cello) performed for the soundtrack of the TV Show Fishing with John. That work appears in a CD produced in 1998.
As of 1993, the members of the quartet were Anna Cholakian, cello, Muneko Otani and Sunghae Anna Lim, violins, and Michiko Oshima, viola.[3]
Cholakian was lost to cancer in February 1996. Composer Andrew Waggoner dedicated his Symphony No. 2 to Anna Cholakian's memory, indicating that the third movement echoed, among other things "an old Armenian song beloved of Anna and her father, “Hokis Murmur (My Soul is Sad).”[4] Composer David Lang also wrote a piece in memory of Cholakian, 'Cello', as part of his piano works series, "memory pieces."[5]
Members of the Cassatt Quartet have served in residency at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and created the Louis Krasner Graduate String Quartet Program for training young, professionally oriented string quartets at the Setnor School of Music of Syracuse University while in extended residency there. Quartet members as of 2001 were Muneko Otani and Jennifer Leshnower, violins; Tawnya Popoff, viola; and Caroline Stinson, cello.[6]
