Strata with Amy Sue Barston

The Strata ensemble joins forces with cellist Amy Sue Barston in a program featuring Stomping Grounds (2015) by Karim Al-Zand (b. 1970) and Olivier Messiaen‘s timeless masterpiece Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), written while the composer was a prisoner of war in 1940–41.

Strata is a coming together of three extraordinary musical talents: Audrey Andrist, piano (an affiliate artist at UMBC); Nathan Williams, clarinet; and James Stern, violin and viola. Their combined credits encompass numerous international prizes and performances across four continents including such places as Carnegie Hall, the Marlboro Festival and the Kennedy Center.

Strata brings “deft ensemble playing” and a “talent…that’s worth getting worked up about” to a repertoire that combines the great trio and duo repertoire of the past with an ever-growing body of new works written especially for them over the more than 25 years they have been playing together. Equally capable of winning over an audience with unique renderings of popular music and of making even the most complex works accessible, exciting and meaningful, Strata has received enthusiastic repeat engagements at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, New York’s historic Maverick Concerts and San Francisco Composers Inc, for which they were listed as one of San Francisco Classical Voice’s “highlights of 2005.” They have been resident artists at the Banff Centre for the Arts and appeared in New York City under the auspices of the International Society for Contemporary Music.

Praised as “passionate and elegant” by The New York Times, cellist Amy Sue Barston has performed as a soloist and chamber musician on stages all over the world, including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Ravinia, Bargemusic, Caramoor, Haan Hall (Jerusalem), The Banff Centre (Canada), The International Musicians’ Seminar (England), The Power House (Australia), and Chicago’s Symphony Center. At age seventeen, she appeared as soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on live television, was the Grand Prize winner in the Society of American Musicians’ Competition, and won First Place and the Audience Prize in the Fischoff International Chamber Music Competition. She is Artistic Director of the Canandaigua Lake Music Festival in New York, and Visiting Cello Professor at Xiamen University in China.