Tashi

In 1973 violinist Ida Kavafian, pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman formed Tashi, initially branded TASHI and later billed as the Tashi Quartet. All four musicians were still in their youth, yet each subsequently built an international solo career. Their immediate purpose was to present Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, a demanding score for clarinet and strings that the composer had drafted as a German prisoner of war and premiered inside the camp during World War II. By the early 1970s the piece remained rarely heard; Tashi’s advocacy helped secure its permanent position in the chamber repertoire. The ensemble captured the work for RCA in 1976, an edition that has never left the catalog and was singled out by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise. Further commissions followed, among them Toru Takemitsu’s Quatrain II, which Tashi introduced in 1977. Additional RCA projects juxtaposed Mozart and Beethoven with newer scores. The group dissolved in 1978. Although reports often describe a thirty-year silence broken only by a 2008 reunion marking the centenary of Messiaen’s birth, the quartet actually released Rendezvous with Tashi on RCA in 1992, appeared in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore during the early 1990s, and taped Charles Wuorinen’s music for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1996—an album later reissued by Naxos in 2006.