October 11, 2002 Contact: Li-Ling Wang

Program features J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 ("The Art of the Fugue")

The Juilliard String Quartet presents the first of two concerts in the 2002-2003 Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital Series on Tuesday, November 19 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall. The Quartet, whose members are first violinist Joel Smirnoff, second violinist Ronald Copes, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Joel Krosnick, perform a program which features J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080. FREE tickets are required for this concert and are available at the Juilliard Box Office starting Tuesday, October 29. The Box Office, located at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza, is open Monday through Friday, from 11 AM to 6 PM. For more information, please call the box office at (212) 769-7406.

The second concert by the Juilliard String Quartet takes place on Tuesday, February 11, 2003 at 8 PM in Alice Tully Hall. The program includes the New York premiere of Gunther Schuller’s Quartet No. 4, as well as Mozart’s String Quartet in B-flat Major, K. 458 ("Hunt"), and Beethoven’s String Quartet in C Major,
Op. 59, No. 3 ("Rasumovsky"). Violist Samuel Rhodes has been associated with composer Gunther Schuller since before Mr. Rhodes joined the Juilliard String Quartet; he was part of an ensemble founded by Mr. Schuller, which gave concerts at Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Hall) called 20^th Century Innovations. Mr. Rhodes has said being part of that ensemble gave him a tremendous introduction to the 'newest music’.

Formed in 1946 as a resident teaching and performing ensemble at Juilliard, the Juilliard String Quartet has established and maintained a reputation as one of the world's great chamber ensembles. The ensemble, consisting of first violinist Joel Smirnoff, second violinist Ronald Copes, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Joel Krosnick, has performed throughout the world in recitals, at music festivals, and with major symphony orchestras as concerto quartet-soloist. In 1961, the Juilliard String Quartet became the first American quartet to visit the Soviet Union. A continuing residency at the Library of Congress, begun in 1962, inspired a series of concerts, broadcast nationwide, in which the Quartet performs on the library's matched set of Stradivarius instruments. In the five decades of its association with The Juilliard School, the Quartet has trained some of the world's foremost ensembles including the American, Brentano, Concord, Emerson, LaSalle, Mendelssohn, Shanghai, Tokyo, St. Lawrence, and Whitman string quartets. The Juilliard String Quartet has recorded exclusively for Sony Classical label and has been associated with the label since 1949; its recording of J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 was made
in 1992.