Fauré: Quartet No. 2 in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 45
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Alessio Bax
Ani Kavafian
Yura Lee
Paul Watkins
Alessio Bax won first prize at both the Leeds and Hamamatsu International Piano Competitions, and has appeared with nearly 200 orchestras, including the New York, London, and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras; the Boston, Baltimore, Dallas, Cincinnati, Seattle, Sydney, BBC Scottish, and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestras; the Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras; and the Tokyo and NHK Symphonies in Japan. He is the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant, the Andrew Wolf Chamber Music Award, and the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists. At age 14, Bax graduated with top honors from the conservatory of Bari, Italy. He is a former member of CMS’s Bowers Program and is on the faculty at New England Conservatory. For ten years, Bax has been Artistic Director of the Incontri in Terra di Siena Festival, and is the Artistic Director of the London Festival of Chamber Music at Smith Square Hall in London. He also serves as Co-Artistic Director of the Joaquín Achúcarro Foundation for emerging pianists.
Violinist Ani Kavafian enjoys a prolific career as a soloist, chamber musician, and professor. She has performed with many of America’s leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony. In the 2019-20 season, she continued her longtime association as an artist of the Chamber Music Society with appearances in New York and on tour. Last summer she participated in several music festivals, including the Heifetz International Institute and the Sarasota Chamber Music, Bridgehampton, Meadowmount, Norfolk, and Angel Fire festivals. She and her sister, violinist and violist Ida Kavafian, have performed with the symphonies of Detroit, Colorado, Tucson, San Antonio, and Cincinnati, and have recorded the music of Mozart and Sarasate on the Nonesuch label. She is a Full Professor at Yale University and has appeared at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall numerous times with colleagues and students from Yale. She has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions award and has appeared at the White House on three occasions. Her recordings can be heard on the Nonesuch, RCA, Columbia, Arabesque, and Delos labels. Born in Istanbul of Armenian heritage, Kavafian studied violin in the US with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff. She received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School under Ivan Galamian. She plays the 1736 Muir McKenzie Stradivarius violin.
Violinist/violist Yura Lee is a multifaceted musician, as a soloist and as a chamber musician, and one of the very few that is equally virtuosic on both violin and viola. She has performed with major orchestras including those of New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. She has given recitals in London’s Wigmore Hall, Vienna’s Musikverein, Salzburg’s Mozarteum, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. At age 12, she became the youngest artist ever to receive the Debut Artist of the Year prize at the Performance Today awards given by National Public Radio. She is the recipient of a 2007 Avery Fisher Career Grant and the first prize winner of the 2013 ARD Competition. She has received numerous other international prizes, including top prizes in the Mozart, Indianapolis, Hannover, Kreisler, Bashmet, and Paganini competitions. Her CD Mozart in Paris, with Reinhard Goebel and the Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, received the prestigious Diapason d’Or Award. As a chamber musician, she regularly takes part in the festivals of Seattle, Marlboro, Salzburg, Verbier, and Caramoor. Her main teachers included Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Thomas Riebl, Ana Chumachenko, and Nobuko Imai. An alum of CMS's Bowers Program, Lee is on the faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Nugget.
Paul Watkins enjoys a distinguished career as soloist, chamber musician, and conductor. The cellist of the Emerson String Quartet from 2013 until its disbanding in 2023, he was also Artistic Director of the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival from 2014 to 2026, and in 2019 was appointed Professor of Cello at the Yale School of Music. He has performed as soloist with prestigious orchestras worldwide. A dedicated chamber musician, he was a member of the Nash Ensemble from 1997 until 2013 and appears regularly at CMS. Watkins has held the positions of Music Director of the English Chamber Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Ulster Orchestra. His extensive discography as a cellist includes more than 70 recordings, and his first recording as a conductor, of the Britten and Berg violin concertos with Daniel Hope, received a Grammy nomination. His recent recording of the Beethoven Cello Sonatas with Alessio Bax was Gramophone’s June 2026 Recording of the Month.
Recorded live in Alice Tully Hall on January 29, 2017.
Video produced by Ibis Productions.