Aizuri Quartet

The Aizuri Quartet has impressed critics and audiences with its technical prowess and interpretive range, which it has applied to a range of contemporary works and unusual collaborations as well as to traditional repertory. The quartet has commissioned new works from several prominent contemporary American composers. The Aizuri Quartet was formed in New York in 2012. The group took its name from the Japanese woodblock process aizuri-e, which uses blue ink and is notable for its level of detail. The original members were violinists Miho Saegusa and Zoe Martin-Doike, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Karen Ouzounian; Ariana Kim replaced the departing Martin-Doike in 2015, and she was, in turn, replaced by Emma Frucht in 2019. The new group immediately found prestigious residencies at the Ravinia Festival's Steans Music Institute outside Chicago (2014), the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (2014-2016), the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in suburban New York (2015-2016), and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017-2018). The Aizuri Quartet won major prizes both abroad (the 2015 Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition in London and the 2017 Osaka International Chamber Music Competition in Japan) and at home (the M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan). In 2018, the quartet released its debut album, Blueprinting; the album included the newly commissioned Blueprint by Caroline Shaw, and it snared a Grammy Award nomination for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Recording and was named one of the Best Classical Albums of 2018 by the U.S. National Public Radio network. The Aizuri Quartet has appeared in major U.S. chamber music series, some of them virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, including in concerts at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, New Orleans Friends of Chamber Music, and the 92nd Street Y in New York. The group has commissioned new works from several other composers, in addition to Shaw, such as Lembit Beecher, Paul Wiancko, and Yevgeniy Sharlat. The Aizuri Quartet has collaborated with a diverse range of musicians that includes Celtic harpist Maeve Gilchrist, progressive rock guitarist Nels Cline, and shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki. The group received the Cleveland Quartet Award for the period 2022-2024. It joined Cline on the 2021 album Douglas J. Cuomo: Seven Limbs and returned in 2023 on the Azica Records label with the album Earthdrawn Skies. The group members believe in "an integrative approach to music-making, in which their teaching, performing, writing, arranging, curation and role in the community are all connected," and it founded the AizuriKids online concert series during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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