Del Sol Quartet Wins CMA/ASCAP Award

For Immediate Release December 18th, 2007

Del Sol Quartet Wins CMA/ASCAP Award
for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music
First Prize, Ensemble-Mixed Repertory

Given annually, the award recognizes ensembles, presenters and festivals that have demonstrated extraordinary commitment to 20th- and 21st-century music, especially works written in the past 25 years. In addition to considering originality, the independent panel of judges looked for innovative presentation and audience-development strategies. The prizes will be given out at the Chamber Music America National Conference in New York City on January 5, 2008, which will be CMA’s 30th Anniversary. The awards are given jointly by Chamber Music America and ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers).

This marks the second time San Francisco-based Del Sol Quartet has received this award. Through collaborations with other artists Del Sol consistently has sought to expand the role of the string quartet beyond traditional classical chamber music. In July 2007 Del Sol performed Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera” at the Santa Fe Opera’s new music series with Wu Man, pipa soloist. In this performance, the Quartet members integrated their string playing with additional vocal and percussion roles while moving around onstage, all within a full-scale operatic production. The Quartet plans to explore multimedia collaborations further in the current 2007-08 season, including upcoming performances of “String Wreck” with choreographer Charles Moulton and the Janice Garrett Dance Company in April 2008 and “Divide Light,” a new operetta by composer Thomas Edward Morgan and visual artist Lesley Dill, based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, to be presented by Montalvo Arts Center in August 2008.

Del Sol's groundbreaking performance with hip-hop inspired composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain of his complete string quartets was featured nationally on the CBS Evening News. During the spring of 2006 the quartet also partnered with composers Duo Huang, Kui Dong and Melody of China, the Bay Area's internationally acclaimed traditional Chinese music ensemble, to perform new works written for the combination of Chinese instruments and string quartet. In their previous season Del Sol collaborated with Hyo-Shin Na and five other contemporary women composers from Korea, premiering their work in Seoul and San Francisco.

At a recent concert at the Library of Congress, the Del Sol Quartet, praised by critics as “emotionally riveting,” “immediately engrossing and consuming,” "first rate,” and “taut and propulsive,” premiered a work by Grawemeyer Award-winning composer, Chinary Ung, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, plus works by Kui Dong, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Peter Sculthorpe’s Quartet no.16 for string quartet and didgeridoo.

The members of the Del Sol String Quartet are Kate Stenberg and Rick Shinozaki, violinists, Charlton Lee, violist, and Hannah Addario-Berry, cellist. The quartet began at the renowned Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada, after which it was awarded a residency at San Francisco State University in association with the Alexander String Quartet. www.delsolquartet.com
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Umbilical Chords: Women Composers and the Creative Process

The Del Sol String Quartet premieres a retrospective of music composed by and about women from the past 111 years.

May 27 (Point Reyes Station)
May 30 (Berkeley)
May 31 (San Jose)
June 3 (San Francisco)

Click here for a PDF of the full press release.

References in Feb. '07 Chamber Music

Del Sol is mentioned three times in the February 2007 issue (Vol. 24, No. 1) of Chamber Music magazine.

"A Midwestern Modernist" by James M. Keller, an article about Ruth Crawford Seeger
p. 67 talks about Crawford's String Quartet 1931, Andante movement as
“one I would recommend wholeheartedly is provided by the Del Sol String Quartet, a San Francisco foursome steeped in bravery and imagination.” He refers to Tear as “the group’s mind-expanding sampler CD.” He goes on to describe how Del Sol plays the movement faster than “any of the competition; ... [which] allows for a more fluid fluctuation among the constant waxing and waning of the four instruments...[T]he Del Sols’ result is grippingly otherworldly rather than just scrawny, and their ghostly timbre is abetted by an unusually vivid recorded acoustic. I hope we may look forward to their recording of this work in its entirety.”

p. 63, picture of Tear CD jacket
Click here for more info on Tear

"The Kronos Tradition" by Frank Otieri, p. 41
"In today's chamber music landscape — where quartets ranging from the Cassatt, Del Sol[emphasis added], Lark and Pacifica to genre-defying ensembles such as Ethel and Invert perform new music extensively and in some cases exclusively — it's difficult to remember the pre-Kronos idea of what a string quartet was or could be."