Ivalas Quartet begins month-long Bravo! Vail residency on Tuesday

Although Bravo! Vail grew from a small chamber music series in the late 1980s to a full summer festival of international orchestras, chamber music remains at the heart of its programming. This year, the festival welcomes its inaugural month-long resident chamber ensemble, the Ivalas Quartet, making its Bravo! Vail debut from July 1-27 with more than 16 free performances throughout the valley. Besides formal concerts, the group will lead several Little Listeners community events for children at local libraries and perform with Bravo! Vail’s 2025 piano fellows and other musicians.

The Ivalas’s mission is to celebrate historically underrepresented voices, usually past and present composers who are people of color, like the members of the quartet, who program their music with well-known selections from the repertory. A loose unifying theme connects them.

That mission inspired violist Marcus Stevenson to join the New York-based group in late 2023, when he was a graduate student at the Juilliard School and the viola seat became available. The group was halfway through its graduate residency at Juilliard at the time, studying with the prestigious Juilliard String Quartet. Stevenson joined violinist Reuben Kebede and cellist Pedro Sánchez, founding members of Ivalas, at the University of Michigan, where the group was formed in 2017. Second violinist Tiani Butts became a member when the Ivalas was in residence at the University of Colorado-Boulder under the mentorship of the Takács Quartet.

Read the full article at VailDaily.com