Juilliard String Quartet

Founded in 1946, the Juilliard String Quartet continues to inspire audiences around the world. The ensemble draws on a deep and vital engagement with the classics, while embracing championing new works, a vibrant combination of the familiar and the daring. Each Quartet performance is a unique experience, bringing together its members’ profound understanding, total commitment, and unceasing curiosity in sharing the wonders of the string quartet literature.

The quartet’s recordings of the Bartók and Schoenberg quartets, as well as those of Debussy, Ravel and Beethoven, have won Grammy Awards. Adding to its celebrated discography, an album of works by Beethoven, Bartók, and Dvořák was released by Sony Classical in 2021. In fall 2018, an new album featured the world premiere recording of Mario Davidovsky’s Fragments (2016) with Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 95 and Bartók’s Quartet No. 1. 

Its most recent season brought the JSQ to Amsterdam, Vienna, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, to the chamber music societies of Detroit and Philadelphia, and to masterclasses at the Tianjin Juilliard School in China. 

Sony’s 2014 reissue of the Juilliard’s landmark recordings of the first four Elliott Carter String Quartets, with the 2013 recording of Carter’s fifth quartet, traces a remarkable period in the evolution of both composer and ensemble. 

In keeping with that evolution, the Quartet was joined in 2016 by Juilliard educated cellist Astrid Schween, who trained under Leonard Rose, Harvey Shapiro, and Bernard Greenhouse, made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at 16, and was mentored early on by Jacqueline du Pre and Zubin Mehta. In 2018, further evolution occurred, when Areta Zhulla joined the Quartet as first violin with multiple degrees from Juilliard, where she studied under Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho. She is also Artistic Director of the Perlman-Genesis Violin Project at the Tel-Aviv Conservatory.