CANCELED - Momenta - Visiting Artist Series

Members of Momenta Quartet are Emilie-Anne Gendron and Alex Shiozaki, violins; Stephanie Griffin, viola; and Michael Haas, cello. Joining the group is special guest Manon Hutton-DeWys, piano. As part of the Williams Visiting Artist Series, they present two piano quintets by renowned women composers, Amy Beach and Grazyna Bacewicz. Also featured is a quartet by faculty member Ileana Perez Velazquez, Elegía for String Quartet (2017), a piece inspired by the work of Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez and references the flamenco clave as a point of departure. Momenta crowns the evening with String Quartet No. 2 by Ursula Mamlok.

About Momenta

Momenta: the plural of momentum – four individuals in motion towards a common goal. This is the idea behind the Momenta Quartet, whose eclectic vision encompasses contemporary music of all aesthetic backgrounds alongside great music from the recent and distant past.  The New York City-based quartet has premiered over 150 works, collaborated with over 200 living composers and in the words of The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “few American players assume Haydn’s idiom with such ease.” Momenta has performed at such prestigious venues as The Library of Congress, the International Cervantino Festival (Mexico) and the Ostrava Music Days (Czech Republic); has traveled in Southeast Asia and Bolivia; and has performed at numerous universities, among them Cornell and Harvard. Its annual self-produced Momenta Festival has met critical acclaim since its inauguration in 2015. The quartet has received prestigious commission grants from the Koussevitzky, Jerome and Barlow Foundations, and its debut album, Similar Motion, is available on Albany Records.

Photo Credit: John Gurrin

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