Finalist: Linden String Quartet

The Linden String Quartet is the gold medalist and grand prize-winner of the 2009 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition as well as recipient of the Coleman-Barstow prize at the 2009 Coleman National Chamber Ensemble Competition. The quartet has quickly risen to become one the country's premier young string quartets. Formed in the spring of 2008, the Quartet has already been praised for its "remarkable depth of technique and brilliantly nuanced, sumptuous tonality...delivered with a palpable, infectious joy". The Linden Quartet is currently the apprentice quartet to the Cavani Quartet at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). Dedicated to community outreach and education, the Quartet is also the Canton Symphony Orchestra's newly appointed Quartet-in-Residence, a program established to promote the arts of Classical music and quartet playing through a series of educational concerts and presentations in various elementary schools in the Northeastern Ohio area.

Mentors include the Cavani String Quartet, Peter Salaff, and Paul Kantor and the Quartet has also worked with Donald Weilerstein and William Preucil of the Cleveland Quartet, Joel Smirnoff and Robert Mann of the Juilliard String Quartet, and members of the Guarneri, Tokyo, and St. Lawrence Quartets. The Quartet has collaborated with guitarist and CIM faculty member Jason Vieaux, mezzo-soprano Jana Baty, violinist Geoff Nuttall, as well as acclaimed accordion and bandonéon player Julian Labro. This past summer, the Linden Quartet were resident artists at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, as well as chamber music festivals in Banff, Alberta and Stanford, California. As winners of the Fischoff grand prize, the quartet toured the Midwest in fall 2009 and the 2009-10 season will include appearances at the Emilia Romagna Festival in Italy, a one-week concert tour throughout the state of Kentucky, and a one-week residency at the Music at Port Milford summer chamber music festival in Milford, Ontario.