Edward Dusinberre

Biography

Edward Dusinberre is the first violinist of the Takács Quartet. Dusinberre studied with the Ukrainian violinist Felix Andrievsky at the Royal College of Music in London and at the Juilliard School with Dorothy DeLay and Piotr Milewski. In 1990 he won the British Violin Recital Prize and gave his debut recital in London at the Purcell Room, South Bank Centre. He joined the Takács Quartet in 1993.

Performances and Recordings

Based in Boulder at the University of Colorado, the Takács Quartet performs ninety concerts a year worldwide, throughout Europe as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. The Quartet's award-winning recordings include the complete Beethoven Cycle on the Decca label. In 2005 the Late Beethoven Quartets won Disc of the Year and Chamber Award from BBC Music Magazine, a Gramophone Award and a Japanese Record Academy Award. Their recordings of the early and middle Beethoven quartets won a Grammy, another Gramophone Award, a Chamber Music of America Award and two further awards from the Japanese Recording Academy. More recently the Takács Quartet has recorded for the Hyperion label, making critically acclaimed cds of Schubert, Brahms and Schumann.

Dusinberre regularly performs as a recitalist and concerto soloist. In 2009 he performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with violist Geraldine Walther at the Aspen Music Festival. He has recorded Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and Opus 96 for the Decca label with pianist David Korevaar.

Teaching and Writing

With his Takács Quartet colleagues, Dusinberre teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He teaches individual students and coaches chamber music groups. The Takács Quartet holds summer residencies at the Aspen Festival and at the Music Academy of the West, Santa Barbara. Dusinberre is a Visiting Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music.

Dusinberre writes about music. His book "Beethoven for a Later Age: the journey of a string quartet" was published by Faber and Faber in 2016.[1] His article "She's with the Band" was published by the Financial Times and Los Angeles Times in 2007. Dusinberre has written about Beethoven for the Strad magazine and the Guardian newspaper.

Interdisciplinary Programming

Dusinberre is well known for his innovative program ideas, devising amongst others a project with the poet Robert Pinsky that toured throughout the USA, mixing love poetry with the music of Janáček, Britten and Barber. In 2007 he created a program called " Everyman" inspired by Philip Roth's novel of that name. The award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman read extracts from the novel, surrounded by the music of Arvô Pärt, Philip Glass and concluding with a performance of Schubert's Death and the Maiden.

A collaboration with writer David Lawrence Morse led to Morse’s play Quartet, a drama that explores the circumstances surrounding the composition of Beethoven’s Late Quartets.