Escher String Quartet

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BIOGRAPHY

Adam Barnett-Hart, violin
Bryan Lee, violin
Pierre Lapointe, viola
Brook Speltz, cello

Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its profound musical insight and rare tonal beauty. A former BBC New Generation Artist and recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, the quartet has performed at the BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall and is a regular guest at Wigmore Hall. In its hometown of New York, the ensemble serves as season artists of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.

Highlights of the 2026–27 season include performances throughout North America, with engagements at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Dallas Chamber Music Society, University Musical Society in Ann Arbor, Georgetown Concert Series, UC San Diego ARTPOWER, Music at Kohl Mansion, and other leading venues. The quartet returns to Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on February 27, 2027, for an all-Mozart program featuring Mozart’s celebrated “Haydn” quartets. Escher will also be featured at Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, Vail Music Festival in Colorado, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.

In Canada, the quartet will undertake a residency at University of Toronto Faculty of Music, including a week of residency activities in January and a further residency in March, culminating in a March 25, 2027 performance presented by Music Toronto. The residency will also include collaborations with University of Toronto Faculty of Music chamber musicians.

Escher Quartet achieved critical success with its performances of the entire cycle of string quartets by Béla Bartók in a single-concert format, presented both at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Their Bartók project was featured in The New Yorker in a substantial report by Alex Ross, who praised the quartet’s “near-miraculous control of pitch and coördination of rhythm” and “unerring balance of voices.”

The quartet’s newest recording, released on BIS Records on August 28, 2026, pairs the clarinet quintets of Johannes Brahms and Max Reger with renowned clarinetist Michael Collins. The album brings together Brahms’s elegiac Clarinet Quintet and Reger’s final completed work, his Clarinet Quintet, revealing the extraordinary connections between two late-Romantic masterpieces. The release follows Escher Quartet’s critically acclaimed BIS recordings of the complete Mendelssohn quartets, Dvořák, Borodin and Tchaikovsky quartets, and the complete Ives and Barber quartets, as well as its recording of the complete Janáček quartets and Pavel Haas’s String Quartet No. 2 with percussionist Colin Currie.

Beyond the concert hall, Escher Quartet is proud to support music education through ESQYRE (Escher String Quartet Youth Residency Education), a non-profit classical music organization providing comprehensive educational programs through music performance and instruction for people of all ages. The quartet has also held faculty positions at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and University of Akron in Ohio.

Within months of its inception in 2005, the ensemble came to the attention of key musical figures worldwide. Championed by Emerson Quartet, Escher Quartet was invited by both Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman to be Quartet-in-Residence at each artist’s summer festival: The Young Artists Program at Canada’s National Arts Centre and The Perlman Chamber Music Program on Shelter Island, New York.

Escher Quartet takes its name from the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, inspired by Escher’s method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole.

2026/2027
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