One of them will be the new in-resident artists
By John Funchion

The quest for a new recognizable group to replace the venerable Tokyo String Quartet as the in-resident artist/teachers for the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival continues in earnest this season.
Glacial patience on the part of Director Paul Hawkshaw and Festival Manager, James Nelson will be in order during the process. Among the groups performing at the Music Shed this season are the Artis Quartet from Vienna, the red hot Emerson Quartet, winners of nine Grammy Awards, The Hungarian Keller Quartet, The Brentano Quartet and former graduates of the music program, The Jasper Quartet.
“Finding new artists and teachers for a music school and festival is a process many organizations go through when important members of their team retire,” Hawkshaw pointed out. “The scope is international. Only the best teachers will attract world class students.”
He added, “Artis and Emerson are the cream of the crop of the traditional veteran strong quartets in Europe and America; Brentano and Keller are the next generation –
passionate, virtuosic and at the top of their game; Jasper represents a new generation with new ideas and new music.”
There is no tabula rasa of inexperience among these groups. All are highly skilled in their respective musical worlds. There is a generative force behind each group’s interpretation of music with their own variations on themes.
For instance, The Artis Quartet’s stature is huge. Since 1988, they have performed an annual concert series in the famous Brahms Hall of Vienna’s Musikverein, described as one of the most perfect rooms in the world for chamber music. They also appear in music festivals in Salzburg, Schleswig Holstein, Hong Kong and Paris, to name a few. Audiences are usually thrilled to see violinist Peter Schuhmayer and Johannes Meisl, along with the group’s founder, violist Herbert Kefer, standing while they perform, as cellist Othmar Muller assumes traditional sitting position. One of their most popular performances this season was Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major, K 364 accompanied by the current student orchestra.
According to Hawkshaw, The Emerson Quartet  is “at the absolute pinnacle of American chamber music world. They have their own concert series at both the Smithsonian Washington and Alice Tully Hall in New York. Their inventive and ambitious forays into our musical, cultural milieu has them exploring every aspect of string quartet repertoire from Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.” They will make their debut in the Music Shed on August 3.
Led by Andras Keller, the Keller Quartet, is back in Norfolk for their sixth season. Their type of play strikes a comfortable chord with those who enjoy an impeccable sense of style and a highly technical proficiency. They are considered the next generation, along with the Brentano Quartet which recently became famous for their recording of Beethoven’s Op 131, used as the sound track for the hit film A Late Quartet. Brentano’s cellist, Nina Lee, made a brief appearance in the movie. Hollywood has arrived in Norfolk.
The last and youngest group is the Jasper Quartet. They are 2007 graduates of the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival program. Originally formed while students at Rice University in Texas, they returned for a second season the following year, then spent two years working with the Tokyo Quartet as graduate quartet-in-residence at Yale. As an emerging professional quartet, they won the prestigious Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award in 2012.
Audience participants at future Festival performances will be embarking on a whole new musical journey once the replacement selection for the Tokyo is made. It is anybody’s guess as to who it will be to take us there bridging a temporary gap in time.  Meanwhile, memories of riveting musical interpretations by the Tokyo Quartet on any given searing, hot night at the Music Shed will always remain.