Now in its second season, Marlboro Music’s artist residency program brings exceptional emerging chamber music ensembles to the Marlboro campus throughout the year for deep creative work and concert offerings. Each group is in residence for 1 to 3 weeks, enjoying concentrated time together in a retreat-like environment where they can rehearse new programming, prepare for recording projects, develop community engagement programming, and more. Every ensemble in residence includes at least one Marlboro Music artist, and each residency culminates with a free informal concert, in which the groups share the results of their work with our local community.

Our first 2025-26 residency concert features the Phaidros String Quartet, consisting of Marlboro Music participants Stephanie Zyzak, Claire Bourg, and Zhanbo Zheng, and cellist Leland Ko. Their performance takes place on Sunday, November 9 at 2 pm. Admission is free. Reservations are required.

Please note: so that we can accommodate additional audience, this performance has been moved to the Marlboro Dining Hall (from Ragle Hall). Seating is unreserved (first come, first served).

Program

Haydn: Quartet in A Major, Op. 20, No. 6

Kurtág: Officium breve in memoriam Andreae Szervánszky, Op. 28

Beethoven: Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1

The Phaidros Quartet is the junction of four unique, sensitive, and sincere individuals, founded not just out of love for the genre, but out of a devotion to something deeply human that exists just as much as an experience shared between people as it does as notes encoded on a page.

Though the quartet’s journey began in the fall of 2024 in New York City, its members developed friendships over the course of a decade as classmates and colleagues at various schools and summer festivals. As a young quartet, they are using their Marlboro residency as a period of intensive rehearsal, developing their sound and point of view and the concert program we will hear on November 9.

The group takes its name from Plato’s “Phaedrus,” which is a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus (romanized: Phaidros), and covers subjects ranging from love and friendship to rhetoric and the human soul. Phaedrus also serves as a central symbolic figure in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as a means of discussing the tension between the classical (rational) and romantic (emotional) minds.

Phaidros String Quartet members Stephanie Zyzak, violin; Claire Bourg, violin; Zhanbo Zheng, viola; and Leland Ko, cello.