Apple Hill String Quartet

The Apple Hill String Quartet is a chamber ensemble based in Nelson, New Hampshire, made up of violinists Elise Kuder and Jesse MacDonald, violist Mike Kelley and cellist Jacob MacKay; MacDonald joined in 2020, and Kuder, Kelley and MacKay serve as co-artistic directors. The quartet is the resident ensemble and artistic leadership of the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, whose Summer Chamber Music Workshop has run since 1971 and now offers five ten-day sessions a year to roughly sixty participants each, aged thirteen to eighty, grouped by ability rather than age and coached daily. The center's guiding program, Playing for Peace, treats chamber music as a way of building connection among people of different backgrounds, cultures and ages, and has taken the quartet on residencies and performances in Lebanon, including the Ketermaya refugee camp near Beirut, as well as Myanmar and Peru. Its concert schedule ranges from the Moscow Conservatory, the Curtis Institute, Oberlin and Dartmouth's Hopkins Center to community rooms such as the Harrisville General Store in New Hampshire. Programs mix the historic quartet repertoire with contemporary voices, music gathered on the group's travels and new commissions, many of them written by Apple Hill alumni. The players hold degrees from Oberlin, Juilliard, the New England Conservatory and Rice University, and the ensemble has recorded the Frank Bridge and Cesar Franck piano quintets with pianist Sally Pinkas for MSR Classics. Chamber Music America has recognized Apple Hill with its CMAcclaim award, and The Strad has described the quartet as dashing and extraordinary.

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