Amernet Quartet Concert Featuring William Ransom

7:30pm

Main Gallery

The celebrated Amernet String Quartet will be joined by distinguished guest pianist William Ransom in the intimate Miami Beach Urban Studios for a program of Shostakovich and Dohnanyi. Free Admission.

ABOUT THE AMERNET

The Amernet String Quartet has garnered worldwide praise and recognition as one of today’s exceptional young string quartets. They are the Artists-in-Residence at Florida International University, fascinating with flawless intonation, extraordinary beauty of sound, virtuosic brilliance and precision of ensemble. Strad Magazine described the Amernet as “…a group of exceptional technical ability.”

The Amernet’s performance schedule has taken the quartet across the Americas and to Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. They have collaborated with many of today’s most prominent artists and ensembles including the Tokyo and Ying quartets as well as Shmuel Ashkenasi, Robert deMaine, Roberto Diaz, Gary Hoffman, Ida Kavafian, Anthony McGill, Sherrill Milnes, Michael Tree.Internationally, the quartet has appeared at major festivals around the world, including Cervantino, San Miguel de Allende, Aviv (Israel), and Colima (Mexico), while in Germany a critic commented that their playing was “fascinating, with flawless intonation, extraordinary beauty of sound, virtuosic brilliance and homogeneity of ensemble.” (Nürnberger Nachrichten). The Amernet’s U.S. engagements have included the Kennedy Center, the Tilles Center, Caramoor, Sunday Afternoons of Music in Miami, Ensemble Music Society, the Great Lakes Festival, Newport, Friends of Chamber Music in Arizona and Friends of Chamber Music in Syracuse, LPR in New York City, Chamber Music Society of Louisville, Music on the Edge in Pittsburgh, the University of Maine – Collins Center, and Market Square Concerts. The Amernet has also appeared as quartet soloist with the Cincinnati Symphony and Alan Gilbert. Earlier in their career, the Amernet won the gold medal at the Tokyo International Music Competition before being named first prize winners of the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition.

ABOUT WILLIAM RANSOM

Pianist William Ransom has appeared in recital, as soloist with orchestras, and as a chamber musician in Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, Korea, South America, Mexico, and throughout the United States. He has performed in New York’s Weill Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Town Hall, and Merkin Hall; in Orchestra Halls in Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta; at the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and in Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, Dallas, and Los Angeles. He has performed for the American Ambassadors to Japan and Ireland, and his performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio and Television in the United States, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and Poland. His recording of Enoch Arden, by Richard Strauss, The Music of Alfredo Barili, and Chamber Music of Johannes Brahms were released on the ACA label. Ransom can also be heard on Heartkeys, from Rising Star Records.

Ransom has commissioned and premiered several major works by composer Stephen Paulus, and he was also the featured pianist performing music by Dwight Andrews used in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway hit, The Piano Lesson, as well as the Hallmark Hall of Fame movie based on the same play. A popular performer on many University concert series, he has performed at numerous colleges around the country including Yale, Cornell, Duke, Tulane, Vanderbilt, M.I.T., and Stanford, where he has also given master classes.

Born in Boston, Ransom began his musical studies at an early age. He was a scholarship student of William Masselos at the Juilliard School in New York (BM and MM), and he also worked with Theodore Lettvin at the University of Michigan (DMA) and Madame Gaby Casadesus at the Ravel Academy in France. Ransom is currently the Mary L. Emerson Professor of Piano and head of the piano faculty at Emory University in Atlanta. He is founder and Artistic Director of the Emory Chamber Music Society of Atlanta and has collaborated with such artists as cellists Yo-Yo Ma and Steven Isserlis; clarinetist Richard Stoltzman; members of the Tokyo, Cleveland, St. Petersburg and Lark String Quartets; violinist Robert McDuffie; guitarist Eliot Fisk, and members of the Empire Brass Quintet and the percussion group Nexus among many others. In the summers, Ransom is Artistic Director of the Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival in North Carolina and also an artist-faculty member of the Kamisaibara Pianists Camp in Japan.