Dover Quartet Adds Avery Fisher Career Grant to Growing String of Honors
It has just been announced that the Dover Quartet – “the young American string quartet of the moment” (New Yorker) – has been named as the recipient of a 2017 Avery Fisher Career Grant, one of classical music’s most prestigious awards. Chosen for their outstanding artistry, the Dovers will be honored today (Wednesday, March 15) at WQXR’s Greene Space, where – being currently on tour in Europe – they will be represented by a short video excerpt.
Already recognized with a string of honors that include the Cleveland Quartet Award and an inaugural Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, the Dovers follow in the footsteps of such previous Avery Fisher Career Grant recipients as pianists Kirill Gerstein and Yuja Wang, clarinetist Anthony McGill, violinists Augustin Hadelich and Leila Josefowicz, and the Pacifica Quartet. Their fellow 2017 recipients are violinists Chad Hoopes and Stephen Waarts and pianist Haochen Zhang, like whom they look forward to receiving a cash award of $25,000 and being featured on WNET Thirteen’s program NYC-ARTS.
About the Avery Fisher Career Grant
The Avery Fisher Artist Program, established by the late Avery Fisher as part of a major gift to Lincoln Center in 1974, serves as a monument to his philanthropy and love of music. The Career Grants in particular exemplify Fisher’s devotion to helping young artists and embody his philosophy to give back to the world what music had given to him. The program continues to provide recognition in two categories, the Career Grants and the Prize, to instrumentalists and chamber ensembles who must be U.S. citizens or permanent U.S. residents. The Avery Fisher Artist Program is committed to all forms of diversity, with award recipients being chosen based on outstanding artistic merit. Final selections are made by the Program’s Executive Committee. Avery Fisher Career Grants of the Avery Fisher Artist Program are designed to give professional assistance and recognition to talented instrumentalists, as well as chamber ensembles, who the Recommendation Board and Executive Committee of the Avery Fisher Artist Program believe to have great potential for major careers. Each recipient receives an award of $25,000, to be used for specific needs in furthering a career. Up to five Avery Fisher Career Grants may be given each year. Recipients are nominated by the program’s Recommendation Board, made up of nationally known instrumentalists, conductors, composers, music educators, managers, and presenters.
About the Dover Quartet
Having enjoyed a “rise to the top [that] looks practically meteoric” (Strings), the Dover Quartet is fast becoming a major presence on the international scene. This season, after making its recording debut with the release of an all-Mozart album on the Cedille label, the quartet embarked on a pair of North American tours, first in company with double-bassist Edgar Meyer and then with mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital. Currently making debuts in eleven cities across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the group also performs at Washington’s Kennedy Center and in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and two dozen more U.S. cities this season, besides continuing three-year residencies at both Northwestern University and the Peoples’ Symphony Concerts in New York. Over the course of the season, the Dovers also undertake the first complete Beethoven quartet cycles of their career, at the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, the University of Connecticut, and SUNY Buffalo, where they follow in the footsteps of the Budapest, Guarneri and Cleveland Quartets by performing the master composer’s complete quartet output in the university’s famous “Slee Cycle” series. As the Chicago Tribune put it, “The Dover Quartet players have it in them to become the next Guarneri String Quartet – they’re that good.”
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© 21C Media Group, March 2017
