Thanks to Guoneng Zhong for taking our new publicity photos.

Dear Friends,

Happy 2010! We have big news in the New Year! We are thrilled to announce that we have joined Astral Artists as a winner of their 2010 auditions. Through this partnership, we will have the opportunity to perform more concerts and outreach, especially around the Philadelphia area. One of our first exciting projects is that we will work with Aaron Jay Kernis on his Second Quartet next year and perform the piece on our Philadelphia debut recital, October 17th.

We recently returned from St. Louis, where we had a great time coaching and teaching the high school students in the Community Music School. This year we expanded the amount of coaching and community performance we have done. This began during a wonderful residency in Hickory, NC in September with the Western Piedmont Symphony and has continued through the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts in Katonah, NY, in St. Louis, and at Oberlin Conservatory this January.

This March we will return to Caramoor to complete the second installment of our year-long residency as Caramoor's 2009-10 Ernst C. Stiefel String Quartet. We will perform a program paralleling the innovations of Webern and Beethoven, relating Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 1 and Op. 127 with pieces from Webern's early and later styles. In August we will present our culminating recital at Caramoor, including the world premiere of a quartet written for us by Annie Gosfield.

We are returning to Naples, FL where we had a wonderful experience last December collaborating with pianist Ilya Itin. We are delighted that we will continue our role as resident quartet at Naples Chamber Classics through the 2010-11 season as well. This March we will be performing concertos with the chamber symphony under the direction of Maestro William Noll.

After our first experience in Japan at the Pacific Music Festival last summer, we couldn’t wait to plan a return trip. From April 1-3 we will be playing three concerts in Tokyo including a recital at the Spring Festival - Tokyo Opera Nomori. We hope to have many more opportunities visit Japan in the future. Also in April, we have the great opportunity to work with Krzysztof Penderecki and perform one of his string quartets through the Yale School of Music.

In May, we will be participating in a Professional Training Workshop with Leon Fleisher, a program of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall. Later that month, we will make our first appearance in Sam's home state of Alaska as the resident quartet at Juneau Jazz and Classics. We are especially excited to collaborate in Juneau with our mentor, Norman Fischer, and his wife, Jeanne. Afterwards, we will head up to Fairbanks to play a concert in Sam's hometown and see some of the amazing scenery in which he grew up.

This is our final semester at the Yale School of Music studying with the Tokyo Quartet. We are immensely thankful to the entire Yale community and we are very excited looking forward to our future. Thanks for reading and we hope to see you soon!

Sincerely,

The Jasper String Quartet
J, Sae, Sam, Rachel