The Cypress String Quartet came into being in 1996 and quickly rose to prominence as one of the most inventive and widely followed ensembles along the U.S. West Coast, placing particular emphasis on new music. Its run ended with a disbandment in 2016.
The four players first assembled during the summer of the founding year and immediately set themselves a regimen of six-to-eight-hour daily rehearsals. Violinists Cecily Ward and Tom Stone, violist Paul Wakabayashi, and cellist Jennifer Kloetzel formed the original roster; Ethan Filner succeeded Wakabayashi on viola in 2001. At the outset the members recalled accepting work “at any venue that would hire the four of us,” yet their calendar soon swelled to roughly one hundred concerts a year, with engagements in Mexico, principal European countries, and Japan woven among domestic dates.
The ensemble’s recorded output proved unusually substantial, spanning both contemporary scores and core repertoire. Its inaugural release, Live: Call & Response 2000—featuring works by Mozart, Beethoven, and Dan Coleman—appeared on the quartet’s own label in 2002. Running annually from 2000 through 2016, Call & Response commissioned a new composition each year that responded to classical models and underscored their continued vitality. Further recordings appeared on Summit, MinMax Music, and Naxos, including a distinguished 2009 Naxos disc of quartets by the then 85-year-old Benjamin Lees, before the group signed with Avie and issued a complete Beethoven cycle captured several years earlier under Cypress Performing Arts Association auspices.
Avie went on to issue additional titles, among them the 2013 collection The American Album of U.S. quartets and a Skywalker Sound recording of Dvorák’s Cypresses for string quartet released the same year. Material continued to surface on the label after the 2016 farewell, beginning with a 2017 album of Brahms sextets featuring Zuill Bailey and Barry Shiffman and followed in 2018 by a set of Elena Ruehr’s six quartets performed with the Borromeo String Quartet.
