Calidore String Quartet

Formed in 2010 at the Colburn Conservatory of Music within Los Angeles’s Colburn School, the Calidore String Quartet adopted a name that merges “Cali-” for California with “doré,” the French word for golden, alluding to the state’s longstanding nickname. Violinists Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violist Jeremy Berry, and cellist Estelle Choi have constituted the ensemble since its inception. Early training took the group to chamber-music courses at Madrid’s Reina Sofia School of Music and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, supplemented by guidance from the Quatuor Ébène, the Emerson Quartet, and Arnold Steinhardt of the Guarneri String Quartet. Within two years the quartet had begun collecting major honors, among them first prizes at the 2012 ARD International Music Competition in Munich and the International Chamber Music Competition Hamburg. Further distinctions followed, including the $100,000 grand prize—the world’s largest chamber-music award—at the University of Michigan’s M-Prize in 2016, a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship that same year (the first awarded to an American ensemble), and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2018. Earlier, after earning some of the field’s highest accolades, the quartet signed with Signum Classics.

The ensemble has appeared at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, and Kumho Art Hall in Seoul, while also becoming a frequent presence at the Verbier, Ravinia, Rheingau, and Mostly Mozart festivals. Its first commercial recording, devoted to quartets by Haydn and Mendelssohn, was issued on the Colburn School’s own label. The debut Signum Classics album, Resilience, appeared in 2018, followed in 2020 by the thematic collection Babel, which juxtaposed works of Schumann, Shostakovich, and Caroline Shaw. Additional contemporary scores by György Kurtág and Jörg Widmann have also entered the repertoire. In 2023 the quartet launched a recorded Beethoven cycle with an album of the composer’s late quartets. After holding artist-in-residence positions at Stony Brook University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan, the group joined the faculty of the University of Delaware in 2021.