An Obie’s Guide to the Juilliard String Quartet

It’s a short list of string quartets that get to celebrate their 80th birthday. But this year, the Juilliard String Quartet is blowing out the candles on that cake.

Founded in 1946 at the Juilliard School in New York City, the quartet has earned four Grammy Awards across its lifespan, which they’ve paired with a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. To this day, they maintain their sterling reputation as outstanding performers and influential teachers. 

It’s been more than a decade since Oberlin audiences have had an opportunity to hear from the Juilliard—but the stars have finally aligned once again: The quartet will take the stage at Finney Chapel on Saturday, September 26, kicking off a new season of the historic Artist Recital Series.

One quote pretty much covers it.

The quartet’s bio doesn’t bother with a long list of the accolades it’s racked up over four-fifths of a century. In 2014, the Boston Globe dubbed them “the most important American quartet in history.” That same review went on to say that “some groups seem to wrestle with their past and legacy; the Juilliard seems completely revitalized.” 

Since then, the Juilliard’s been revitalized again, with an all-new lineup: violinists Areta Zhulla and Leonard Fu, violist Molly Carr, and cellist Astrid Schween.

Six degrees of Oberlin Conservatory…

Through much of its storied history, the quartet has boasted Oberlin ties: Violinist and renowned educator Ronald Copes, a 1971 Oberlin grad, was a member from 1997 till 2025. That's him laying down the high end in a recent band photo.

These days, there’s a brand-new Obie tie too. As it happens, Molly Carr is on maternity leave and won’t make it to campus. That’s good news for her, and fine news for the rest of us too: Her replacement is violist Nicholas Gallitano, a 2019 Oberlin grad.

Gallitano, who hasn’t been back to campus since commencement, earned a Double Degree in viola performance and East Asian studies. He looks forward to visiting his mentors—like Professor of Viola Peter Slowik—and to walking his old campus once again.

“ I'm preparing myself for it looking largely the same, but also feeling completely different,” he says. That’s a familiar experience for many Obie grads!

The Juilliard claims other Oberlin connections too: Schween visited a few years ago to rehearse with the Verona Quartet (the conservatory’s quartet in residence), and Zhulla’s husband, Oleksiy Zakharov ’05, earned a bassoon performance degree here.

Then there’s Fu.

“ So many of my friends have gone to Oberlin, and I've actually never been—so I'm really excited!” he says.

The latest from the greatest…

The quartet recently embarked on “Letters to Ludwig,” a multi-year commissioning project that invites living composers to engage with Beethoven’s “late quartets.” These six quartets are among the last pieces he ever composed and are widely considered among his best works.

As part of that initiative, the Juilliard will be performing the master’s String Quartet No. 16 in F Major, Op. 135 at Oberlin.

“There's a long history of the Juilliard String Quartet playing all the Beethoven quartets, but especially the late Beethoven quartets,” Fu says. There’s also a history of them doing them especially well: Their 1985 album, which included Quartet No. 16, won the Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance.

Kurtág’s musical poetry...

Rounding out the program is Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s Six moments musicaux and Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major.

Schween calls the Kurtág piece an “exercise in creating atmosphere and bizarre colors and effects.” In it, the composer cites a poem by the Hungarian poet Endre Ady. So the music “needs deciphering,” as Zhulla puts it. “Like every good poem.”

Next year, the group plans a trip to Hungary to collaborate directly with Kurtág, who is writing a piece just for them—“ at his young age of 100 years,” Fu adds. Incidentally, former Juilliard violist Roger Tapping, who passed away in 2022—and whose daughter is a 2019 graduate of Oberlin College—was a huge advocate for Kurtág’s music.