Aviv Quartet

The Aviv Quartet has gone on to a career of international scope after winning major chamber music prizes, mostly outside its native Israel, in its early years. The group has recorded for the Dalia Classics and Naxos labels. The Aviv Quartet (the name means "spring" in Hebrew) was founded in 1997 by violinists Sergey Ostrovsky and Evgenia Epshtein, violist Shuli Waterman, and cellist Iris Jortner. The two violinists remain members of the group, joined by violist Noemie Bialobroda and cellist Aleksandr Khramouchin. The group studied in Israel with Gad Kogan, Irina Svetlova, and Chaim Taub, then moved to Europe for work with the Alban Berg Quartet at the Musikhochschule Köln and the Daniel Quartet at the Rotterdam Conservatory. It also collaborated at the Paris Conservatory with the Quatuor Ysaÿe at the Paris Conservatory during the 2002-2003 season. The group rounded out its education with master classes from Joseph Kalichstein, Leon Fleisher, and Isaac Stern, among others. This preparation resulted in a series of prizes early in the 2000s decade, including the DaimlerChrysler Grand Prize at the Third Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition, as well as prizes at the Bordeaux and Schubert Competitions in 2003. The group went on to land dates at several of the world's top chamber music venues, including the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, the Louvre Auditorium in Paris, and Carnegie Hall in New York. The Aviv Quartet has toured Brazil, China, and South Africa as well as many European countries. At the 2007 Verbier Festival in Switzerland, the quartet performed a complete cycle of the quartets of Shostakovich. The group also recorded three albums devoted to Shostakovich for the Dalia Classics label. In 2003, it signed to Naxos and released an album of string quartets by Classical-period composer Franz Anton Hoffmeister. The group has continued to record for Naxos, issuing an album devoted to the Holocaust-doomed composer Erwin Schulhoff as well as mainstream repertory. With cellist Amit Peled, the Aviv Quartet released a recording of Schubert's String Quartet in C major, D. 956, on Naxos.
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