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The Colorado Quartet has been a ground-breaking ensemble for nearly three decades. Catapulted onto the scene by back-to-back wins at the Banff International String Quartet and Naumburg competitions, it was the first all-women quartet to attain international stature. The first female quartet in history to perform the complete Beethoven Quartet cycle in Europe and North America, its recording of the cycle will be complete in 2010 on the Parnassus label. Of the Late quartets, Fanfare Magazine said: “The Colorado Quartet tears into these works with a combined tension, cohesion, grace, and complete understanding of the music. . . if it’s the music and what the music says that interests you, well, this is the only set of the late quartets you’ll ever need. Buy it, and marvel. These four women bring Beethoven to intense, blazing life.”

photos by Kevin Sprague

The Colorado Quartet has taught at Yale University, and held residencies at the Oberlin College-Conservatory, the Banff and Orford Centres in Canada, Amherst, Swarthmore and Skidmore Colleges and the New School of Music in Philadelphia. It has held Master Classes on four continents in different languages and in the U.S., including at the Eastman School of Music, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Indiana University, Cincinnati Conservatory and Cleveland Institute of Music.

They received a grant from the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation to collaborate on this program with book groups and church organizations in under-served communities in Iowa, and have taken this approach into the Bard Prison Initiative.

In addition to appearing on the major concert stages of the world, the members of the Colorado Quartet are deeply committed to communicating with a wide range of audiences: from grade-school children to professionals to prison inmates. During their tenure as Visiting Professors at Bard College, they developed a lecture series that places the quartet literature within a cultural context, making it relevant to today’s listener.

The Quartet plays new works by composers of many nationalities, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Meet the Composer Foundation, the Fromm Foundation and BMI. It has recorded new works on Bridge, Albany, New World, Parnassus and other labels. A recording of works by Henry Cowell was named a “best of 1999” by

Gramophone Magazine, and a CD of Schubert and Mendelssohn received the Chamber Music America/WQXR recording award in 2001.

Recordings and live concerts by the Colorado Quartet are frequently heard on radio and TV worldwide including the BBC and CBC, National Public Radio, “St. Paul Sunday”; and TV programs in Europe, South America and Japanese NHK. The Quartet was a special guest on Penn and Teller’s “Sin City Spectacular” on the FX Channel.

The Colorado Quartet is Artistic Director of the Soundfest Chamber Music Festival and Quartet Institute on Cape Cod, founded in 1991, which receives funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Arthur Foundation.

The members of the Colorado Quartet are violinists Julie Rosenfeld and Deborah Lydia Redding, violist Marka Gustavsson and cellist Katie Schlaikjer.