Artist Bio: Fry Street Quartet

Fry Street Quartet: Touring music of the masters as well as exciting original works from visionary composers of our time, the Fry Street Quartet has perfected a "blend of technical precision and scorching spontaneity" (The Strad). Since securing the Grand Prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, the quartet has reached audiences from Carnegie Hall to London, and Sarajevo to Jerusalem, exploring the medium of the string quartet and its life-affirming potential with "profound understanding...depth of expression, and stunning technical astuteness" (Deseret Morning News).

With a discography that includes a wide range of works from Haydn and Beethoven to Stravinsky, Janacek and Rorem, the quartet is known for being "equally at home in the classic repertoire of Mozart and Beethoven or contemporary music." (Palm Beach Daily News). Recordings include The Crossroads Project, released on Navona Records, featuring commissioned works by Laura Kaminsky and Libby Larsen, as well as Kaminsky’s lauded chamber opera As One, released on Albany Records. This season, Chicago’s innovative Guarneri Hall will be releasing a video recording of Canções da America, written for the FSQ by composer Clarice Assad.

The FSQ's tour repertoire reaches many corners of the musical spectrum, including works of Britten, Schubert, Beethoven and Bartok alongside contemporary works. The complete quartets of Bela Bartok have been prominent in the quartet’s repertoire with complete cycles presented by the Salt Lake City-based NOVA series as well as in the Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall at Utah State University, featuring eminent Bartok scholar Peter Laki. The FSQ premiered Laura Kaminsky's chamber opera As One with soprano Sasha Cooke and baritone Kelly Markgraff at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and has gone on to perform the work with Hawaii Opera Theater, Lyric Opera Kansas City, and Chautauqua Opera. The Fry Street Quartet continues to commission and perform new works by a wide range of composers. Pandemonium by Brazilian composer Clarice Assad received its Fry Street premiere with the San Jose Chamber Orchestra; Michael Ellison's Fiddlin' was co-commissioned by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music Series and the Salt Lake City based NOVA series; upcoming premieres include works by composers Nick Benavides and Gabriela Lena Frank. Both Laura Kaminsky's Rising Tide and Libby Larsen’s Emergence were commissioned especially for the quartet's global sustainability initiative, The Crossroads Project.

After more than 50 performances in three different countries, Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project continues to resonate with audiences. This fresh approach to communicating society’s sustainability challenges draws upon all the senses with a unique blend of science and art, and has been featured on NPR's joe’s big idea (aired during All Things Considered), as well as in publications by Yale Climate Connections, Reuters, and the New York Times. After living closely with this project for more than a decade, the FSQ continues to spearhead initiatives to make a difference in the face of the Climate Crisis. Their Climate Commitment, writing on the topic, and working with the institutions and organizations they’re a part of to imagine and implement more sustainable practices all represent ongoing efforts.

The quartet's touring history includes performances at major venues, festivals, and distinguished series such as Carnegie Hall (Weill Hall) and the Schneider Series at the New School in New York, the Jewel Box series in Chicago, Chamber Music Columbus, the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, the DiBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame, the Theosophical Society in London, and the Mozart Gemeinde in Klagenfurt, Austria. The quartet also enjoys a continuing residency with the Salt Lake City-based NOVA series, where they are currently serving as Music Directors in addition to performing regularly on the series.

The Fry Street Quartet holds the Dan C. and Manon Caine Russell Endowed String Quartet Residency at the Caine College of the Arts at Utah State University.

Robert Davies (Physicist/Educator) A physicist and educator at Utah State University, Rob’s work focuses on global environmental change, sustainable human systems, and critical science communication ― which is to say, scientific storytelling for critically important stories. His unique position is jointly sponsored by USU's College of Science, the Caine College of the Arts, and the USU Ecology Center. Rob has served as an officer and meteorologist in the U.S. Air Force, worked for NASA on the International Space Station project, and taught on the faculty of three universities. His scientific work has included research into interactions of spacecraft with the space environment, the fundamental nature of light and information, and Earth's changing climate.

Laura Kaminsky (Composer: Rising Tide) is a composer with "an ear for the new and interesting" whose works are "colorful and harmonically sharp-edged" (The New York Times) and whose "musical language is compounded of hymns, blues, and gestures not unlike Shostakovich's" (inTune). Social and political themes are common in her work, as is an abiding respect for and connection to the natural world. The visual is made manifest in sound, with color and image often serving as the underlying inspiration.

Libby Larsen (Composer: Emergence) is one of America’s most performed living composers. She has created a catalogue of over 500 works spanning virtually every genre from intimate vocal and chamber music to massive orchestral works and over 15 operas. Grammy award-winning and widely recorded, she is constantly sought after for commissions and premieres by major artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, and has established a permanent place for her works in the concert repertory. Larsen believes, "Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music."

Rebecca Allan (Visual Artist) is a New York-based painter whose work centers on landscape and themes of music. Rivers, tributaries, and coastal regions of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and northern England are the artist's primary sites of investigation and inspiration. Exhibited nationally and abroad for more than 25 years, Allan's work attempts to express, in abstract and painterly terms, the fragility of our ecosystems, and the unpredictability of nature’s cycles.

Garth Lenz (Photographer) is an internationally renowned environmental photographer who examines contrasts between the industrialized and natural landscape. The range of his photographic subjects has included the impacts of industrial logging on forests, and the world of modern fossil fuel production and its associated impacts on the landscape. Recent projects have addressed mountaintop removal coal mining, shale gas production, and the Alberta Tar Sands. His work has appeared in leading editorial publications including, Time, GEO, The Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times.

Jeff Counts (Production Manager) is General Manager of the Grand Tetons Music Festival, and past General Manager of the Utah Symphony. He has worked in performing arts planning and logistics for over 15 years and previously spent 6 years as an elementary school educator in his home state of Florida. Jeff speaks and writes about music frequently and provides concert annotation and program articles for orchestras and opera companies around the country. When not focused on music, Jeff enjoys a second life as a pop culture commentator and film critic and appears weekly on the regional television program "Big Movie Mouth-Off.”

Learn more about Rising Tide: The Crossroads Project.