Founded in 2010, the Spektral Quartet (www.spektralquartet.com) is widely regarded as one of Chicago’s most magnetic and forward-thinking chamber ensembles. The group’s inclusive approach to concert format, transforming the audience experience from a transactional one to a far more intimate phenomenon, has earned it a loyal following within and far beyond the city limits.

Since its inception the Spektral Quartet has sought out the discourse between the masterworks of the traditional canon and those written this decade, this year, or this week. Rather than simply pairing Brian Ferneyhough with Josef Haydn or Thomas Adès with Béla Bartók, though, the group offers listeners an even more elastic and absorbing experience through its Sampler Pack concert format. For these performances, shorter works and single movements are curated in a set list that contains a menagerie of musical styles, spanning centuries. The unexpected similarities and enticing contrasts between two or three composers becomes a conversation between twelve.

The 2013/14 season finds the group venturing into another bold endeavor at the intersection of music and everyday life with its Mobile Miniatures project. For it, forty composers from across the US including David Lang, Augusta Read Thomas, Nico Muhly, and Shulamit Ran were commissioned to write ringtone-length pieces for the Spektral Quartet to record and make available to the public for download to mobile devices.

Now in its fourth season, the Spektral Quartet serves as Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. The group was invited in 2013 to join the Rush Hour Series’s Back-of-the-Yards project, which will offer year-long music education and outreach in one of Chicago’s most under-served neighborhoods.

The spring of 2014 will see the launch of the Spektral Quartet’s second album, a Latin jazz collaboration with bandoneon/accordion virtuoso Julien Labro, slated for release on Azica Records. In November of 2013 the Spektral Quartet traveled to Switzerland and France to perform and record Ernest Chausson’s Concerto for violin, piano and string quartet, Op. 21, with violinist Rachel Kolly d’Alba and pianist Christian Chamorel for the Warner Classics label.

Amy Briggs has established herself as a leading interpreter of the music of living composers, while also bringing a fresh perspective to music of the past. Based in Chicago, she plays with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW ensemble, where she has worked with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Augusta Read Thomas, Marc-Anthony Turnage, Oliver Knussen, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Osvaldo Golijov. The Chicago Tribune has called “extraordinary” her “mastery of what lay on the dense, printed page and beyond,” and the Chicago Sun-Times called her a “ferociously talented pianist.” The New York Times described her recent Lincoln Center performance of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza IV as having “a live-wire intensity.”

Amy’s recordings include three critically acclaimed discs of David Rakowski’s Piano Etudes on Bridge Records, two discs of solo piano and chamber music of Augusta Read Thomas for the ART label, music of Conlon Nancarrow, Morton Feldman, Edgar Varese, and Erik Oña for Wergo Records, and a disc of contemporary piano tangos for Parma Records. She has performed across the United States, Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and Asia. Amy Briggs earned her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Piano Performance at Northwestern University as a student of Ursula Oppens; she also studied with Mary Sauer. In 2009 she joined the faculty of the University of Chicago as Director of Chamber Music and Artist-in-Residence. Amy is a Steinway Artist.

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1941, Shmuel Ashkenasi attended the Musical Academy of Tel Aviv and gave his first public performance at the age of eight.  After studying with Ilona Feher, he came to the United States to study with Efrem Zimbalist at the Curtis Institute of Music.

Early in his career he won the Merriweather Post Competition, was a finalist in Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth Competition, and received second prize in the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.  He also won the Young Concert Artists International Auditions in 1961 and 1962.

Mr. Ashkenasi has toured the former Soviet Union twice and concertized extensively in Europe, Israel, the Far East, and the United States. He has collaborated with Rudolf Serkin, Thomas Hampson, Murray Perahia, Peter Serkin, and Menahem Pressler, among others. He has performed with such American orchestras as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, National Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Atlanta Symphony, as well as the the orchestras of Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Zurich, Rotterdam, Geneva, and Stockholm, and the Royal Philharmonic.  As first violinist of the famed Vermeer Quartet throughout its history (1969-2007), he has gained a reputation as one of the world’s outstanding chamber musicians.

From 1969 until 2007, Mr. Ashkenasi was professor of music and artist-in-residence at Northern Illinois University. For the last several years, he has taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago as well as the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.