Festival Finale: Miró Quartet and Beth Newdome Fellows

The Miró Quartet is one of America’s most celebrated string quartets, praised as “furiously committed” by The New Yorker and recognized for its “exceptional tonal focus and interpretive intensity” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. For nearly 30 years, the GRAMMY®-nominated quartet has performed on the world’s most prestigious concert stages, earning accolades from critics and audiences alike. Based in Austin, TX, and thriving on the area’s storied music scene, the Miró takes pride in finding new ways to communicate with audiences of all backgrounds while cultivating the longstanding tradition of chamber music. Miró Quartet’s recent and upcoming projects include a touring and recording project with pianist Lara Downes titled Here on Earth, featuring musical depictions of our planet, its evolution, and the lives of its inhabitants; the premiere of a new version of Kevin Puts’ Credo with the Naples Philharmonic; and collaborations with composers Steven Banks, Tamar-Kali, and Gabriel Kahane, as well as soprano Karen Slack. Having independently released many celebrated recordings for a variety of global labels, the Miró Quartet was nominated for a 2025 GRAMMY® Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance for its second album on Pentatone, Home, featuring two new commissions by Kevin Puts and Caroline Shaw, as well as works by George Walker and Samuel Barber.

It was nominated for a 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Choral Performance for House of Belonging, created in collaboration with Austin-based choral group Conspirare. The quartet recently produced an Emmy Award-winning audiovisual multimedia project titled Transcendence, a documentary centered around a performance of Franz Schubert’s Quartet in G Major on rare Stradivarius instruments, available on livestream, CD, and Blu-ray. Formed in 1995, the Miró Quartet was awarded first prize at several national and international competitions including the Banff International String Quartet Competition and the Naumburg Chamber Music Competition. Deeply committed to music education, members of the Quartet have given master classes at universities and conservatories throughout the world, and since 2003 has served as the quartet-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music. In 2005, the Quartet became the first ensemble ever to be awarded the coveted Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Miró Quartet took its name and its inspiration from the Spanish artist Joan Miró, whose Surrealist works — with subject matter drawn from the realm of memory, dreams, and imaginative fantasy — are some of the most groundbreaking, influential, and admired of the 20th century.