Haydn: Dialogues (feat. The Cramer Quartet)

The Cramer Quartet returns to the cell, this time with a brand new commission from Pulitzer Finalist Leilehua Lanzilotti. Haydn: Dialogues is a multi-season commissioning project that reimagines the traditional string quartet cycle. Over the course of the next ten seasons, concluding in 2032 (Haydn’s 300th birth anniversary), the Resident Artists The Cramer Quartet will perform Haydn’s 68 string quartets alongside newly commissioned works by American composers. Each commission is an invitation for a composer to respond to an opus from Haydn’s string quartet oeuvre in the composer’s own musical voice, writing specifically for historical instruments. Haydn: Dialogues is made possible with support by the New York State Council with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The Cramer Quartet consists of Jessica Park violin, Kate Goddard violin, Maren Rothfritz viola and Michael Unterman violoncello

program

• in the garden by Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983)
• Valencia and Entr’acte by Caroline Shaw (b. 1982) 
•  Op. 77 No. 2 by Franz Joseph Haydn (b. 1732)

about the artists

The Cramer Quartet has recently performed at the Morgan Library, Academy of Early Music, the Stearns Collection of Instruments at the University of Michigan, the Portland Bach Experience, and the world premiere of cello quintet Soul Bop by Brian Nabors at the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia. The Cramer Quartet is in the midst of Haydn: Dialogues, an ambitious multi-year cycle combining Haydn’s 68 string quartets with sixteen new commissions by American composers. This season will also include the next installment of Haydn: Dialogues, featuring the world premiere of a new work by Darian Donovan Thomas to be performed alongside Haydn’s Op. 76 string quartets. Highlights of past seasons include performances of The Seven Last Words Project— an immersive multimedia journey through Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ as reflected upon by seven diverse contemporary composers— at Five Boroughs Music Festival; the quartet’s debut at Music Mountain Summer Festival as the first period instrument ensemble to perform in the concert series 92 year history, and a residency at Festival de Música de Santa Catarina in Jaraguá do Sul, Brazil. The Cramer Quartet is generously supported by New York State Council of the Arts and the Copland Foundation, and is the recipient of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement Grant, Chamber Music America’s Ensemble Forward Grant. The ensemble takes its name from Wilhelm Cramer, a brilliant violinist who enjoyed a multifaceted career as London’s first major string quartet leader. Cramer is credited with popularizing a late 18th century violin bow which became the inspiration for the style of historical bows used by the Cramer Quartet.

Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a composer and multimedia artist whose works often explore dramatic expanses of color and timbre, engaging with themes of place, displacement, and layered time. Lanzilotti was a 2022 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.” Other prestigious honors Lanzilotti has received include a Creative Capital Award, a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award, and recognition as a 2025 USA Fellow. Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, the Copland House Residency Award, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne among others. As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works have been presented at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Sonic Arts Biennial (The Netherlands), Un-Earthed: a festival of listening and environment (UK), Ojai Music Festival (USA), and Thailand International Composition Festival; and in halls such as the Philharmonie de Paris and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. In fall 2025 Lanzilotti’s “luminous new piece” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), of light and stone opened the New York Philharmonic’s season and Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as the orchestra’s Music & Artistic Director designate. As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk's Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne's Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti also premiered and recorded Dai Fujikura’s Viola Concerto Wayfinder as a soloist with the Nagoya Philharmonic, Keita Matsui, conductor. in manus tuas, Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut, was featured in The Boston Globe’s Top 10 classical albums of 2019 and Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019.

As an experimental sound artist, Lanzilotti’s projects include performing with object instruments created by Isamu Noguchi, Toshiko Takaezu, Harry Bertoia, Adam Morford and Maika Garnica; and with Gahlord Dewald as a member of The Yes &. Lanzilotti was part of the inaugural cohort of Wehiwehi, a residency-based gathering of Native Hawaiian artists working at the intersection of indigeneity & contemporary performance supported by the Doris Duke Foundation, and hosted at Shangri La Museum in Honolulu, Hawai’i. Additionally, Lanzilotti is part of the network of musicians and artists in the Wandelweiser collective.Lanzilotti’s video installation works have been shown in The Noguchi Museum; Cranbrook Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Honolulu Museum of Art; Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Cyprus; and Alison Jacques Art Gallery, London, UK.

As a scholar, Lanzilotti’s written publications include contributions to the monograph Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within (Yale University Press, 2024), and to Tuning Calder’s Clouds / Sintonías de las nubes de Calder edited by Vic Brooks, Jennifer Burris, and Mariana Fernández (Calder Foundation and Athénée Press, 2026)—the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling (1954) in the Aula Magna of the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. Lanzilotti’s musical work ​beyond the accident of time (2019) is included in Walking From Scores (Les presses du réel), a bilingual anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance. A dedicated educator, Dr. Lanzilotti has been on the faculty at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development; University of Northern Colorado as the Director and founder of the experimental UNCOmmon Ensemble, Co-director of Open Space Festival of New Music, and Assistant Professor of Viola; and various international summer festivals such as the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity INTERPLAY program. Additionally, Lanzilotti created Shaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings.Lanzilotti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BMus), Yale School of Music (MMus), and Manhattan School of Music (DMA). In addition, Lanzilotti was an orchestral fellow in the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and New World Symphony, participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under Pierre Boulez, and was the original violist in the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. Mentors include Hiroko Primrose, Peter Slowik, Jesse Levine, Martin Bresnick, Wilfried Strehle, Karen Ritscher, and Reiko Füting.