Jerusalem Quartet

Alexander Pavlovsky Violine
Sergei Bresler Violine
Ori Kam Viola
Kyril Zlotnikov Violoncello

Formed in 1996 by four Israeli musicians as a young, dynamic ensemble, the Jerusalem Quartet has since gone through a maturing process that allows it to draw on a wide repertoire without losing its curiosity.

The Jerusalem Quartet appears regularly on the world’s great concert stages: in North American cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Washington, and also at the Ravenna Festival, as well as in the leading concert halls of Europe, and at festivals such as the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, the Verbier Festival, the Rheingau Musik Festival, the Salzburg Festival and the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival.

The Jerusalem Quartet records exclusively with harmonia mundi. The Quartet’s albums of Haydn string quartets and Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the Maiden) won numerous awards including the Diapason d’Or and the BBC Music Magazine Award for Chamber Music. In 2018 the Quartet released two recordings: Dvořák’s String Quintet op. 97 and String Sextet op. 48, and Ravel and Debussy’s string quartets.

In 2019 they released an album that explores Yiddish music in Central Europe between the two world wars, and its wide-ranging influence. The Israeli soprano Hila Baggio joined the ensemble to perform Yiddish cabaret songs from 1920s Warsaw. The Quartet commissioned arrangements of these Yiddish songs from the composer Leonid Desyatnikov. Schulhoff’s Fünf Stücke für Streichquartett (Five Pieces for String Quartet, 1924) and Korngold’s String Quartet No. 2 (1937) complete the programme. In 2020 the Jerusalem Quartet completed their Bartók quartet cycle recording.

Since 2019 the Quartet has toured Europe with Hila Baggio performing their Yiddish cabaret programme – including in the 2021/22 season. In addition, the quartet has recently performed with the Novus String Quartet (in Antwerp and at the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg among other appearances) and given concerts at string quartet biennales in Paris and Lisbon, in repertoire including Dvořák’s String Sextet together with Gary Hoffman and Miguel da Silva.

Other highlights of the 2021/22 season have included a Beethoven cycle at the Wigmore Hall in spring and early summer 2022, US tours in November 2021 and spring 2022 and an Asian tour in June 2022, along with return visits to the Zurich Tonhalle, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Schwetzingen SWR Festival.