Welcome to the Lafayette String Quartet’s Webpage!
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About the Lafayette String Quartet:
In July 1986, four young musicians, based in Detroit and just beginning their professional careers, performed together for the first time as the Lafayette String Quartet. For nearly 40 years the LSQ flourished with its original personnel: violinists Ann Elliott-Goldschmid and Sharon Stanis, violist Joanna Hood, and cellist Pamela Highbaugh Aloni.
For five years, the LSQ remained in Detroit, where its members taught at the Center for Creative Studies/Institute of Music and Dance and at nearby Oakland University. Meanwhile, the LSQ itself received coaching from two of the world’s most esteemed quartets—the Amadeus and the Alban Berg—and from the violinist Rostislav Dubinsky, of the legendary Borodin Quartet, who served as the women’s “musical mentor” until his death in 1997.
The LSQ’s extraordinary musicianship was recognized early on. Already in 1988, it was ranked among the magazine Musical America’s “Young Artists to Watch,” and in its first years it won the Grand Prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and prizes at the Portsmouth (now City of London) International String Quartet Competition, and the Chicago Discovery Competition. As winners of the 1988 Cleveland String Quartet Competition, the LSQ had the opportunity to study for two years with the Cleveland Quartet at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
In 1991, the four women became Artists-in-Residence at the University of Victoria’s School of Music, in British Columbia. Sharon Stanis retired from the University in 2023 while Ann Elliott-Goldschmid, Joanna Hood and Pamela Highbaugh Aloni continue as Associate Professors of violin, viola and cello. The members of the Quartet received honorary doctorates from University Canada West and were honoured with the inaugural Craigdarroch Award for Excellence in Artistic Expression in 2010 from the University of Victoria.
Besides teaching and performing the LSQ made a significant impact on the city of Victoria through their many concerts, serving as section leaders of the Galiano Ensemble, and numerous outreach activities including advocating for music in the public schools, and administering the annual Lafayette Health Awareness Forum.
The LSQ performed across Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe with concerts often allied with masterclasses and workshops; they had a close and lasting relationship with the University of Saskatchewan while playing on the set of Amatis owned by that institution. They collaborated with numerous distinguished colleagues including bassist Gary Karr, clarinetist James Campbell, flutist Eugenia Zukerman, violinists Andrew Dawes and Gary Levinson, violists James Dunham, Atar Arad, and Yariv Aloni, cellists Paul Katz, and Tanya Prochazka. Their many piano collaborations included Arthur Rowe, Bruce Vogt, Eva Solar Kinderman, Luba Edlina Dubinsky, Jane Coop, Robert Silverman, Ronald Turini, Stéphane Lemelin, Alexander Tselyakov, Baya Kakouberi, Flavio Varani and many others. They often collaborated with other string quartets including the Saguenay (Alcan), New Zealand, Penderecki, Molinari, Emily Carr, Quarteto Latinoamericano, and their students, Cuarteto Bellas Artes (formerly Chroma).
The four women also maintained (and continue to maintain) separate careers as solo and chamber-music performers, teachers, and adjudicators.
The LSQ carried a large, wide-ranging repertoire, from the classical period to the present, and commissioned music from (and in many cases collaborated closely with) composers including Murray Adaskin, John Burke, Justin Haynes, David Jaffe, R. Murray Schafer, Eugene Weigel, Kelly Marie Murphy, Nicole Mandryk and Leila Lustig, Vivian Fung, Abigail Richardson-Schulte, and Nicola LeFanu. They performed the complete Beethoven Cycle, the complete Shostakovich Cycle, the quartets of the Second Viennese school with the Molinari Quartet and the complete viola quintets of Mozart with Yariv Aloni.
The LSQ released CDs on the Dorian and Centrediscs (CBC) labels as well as others. Its discography includes major quartets by Borodin, Debussy, Grieg, Shostakovich, and Tchaikovsky; Dvořák’s piano quintets (with Antonin Kubalek); and four CDs of music by Adaskin, on the AdLar label. Its 2002 CBC Records disc Death and the Maiden, featuring music by Schubert, Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, and Rebecca Clarke, won the Western Canadian Music Award for Outstanding Classical Recording. It recorded Michael Longton’s Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze for the 2011 CD Jimi Hendrix Uncovered and the quintets of Dmitri Shostakovich and the commissioned quintet Motion and Distance, by Canadian composer Kelly- Marie Murphy together with marvelous Russian Canadian pianist Alexander Tselyakov. Their final recording, Four Voices, featured works by female composers commissioned by the Lafayette String Quartet.
The LSQ is the subject of David Rounds’ book The Four and the One: In Praise of String Quartets, and a documentary film Creating Harmony.
We acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.
