Bridget Kibbey with Calidore String Quartet

Witness the harp’s dramatic entrance to the concert stage via masterworks from 19th Century France….the French Belle Époque!

View Program Notes

With virtuosic sweeps, opulent arpeggiations, to the most intimate sonorities Bridget Kibbey and the Calidore Quartet team up to share tales of love, death, and the macabre via masters of color: Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, and André Caplet. From behind the harp, and behind the microphone, Kibbey will cast a light on how Debussy changed the way we hear harmony, how Fauré and Caplet were watching and responding, and how the harp turns itself from the most sacred of personas…to the of harbinger of death, via Edgar Allen Poe’s infamous short story “The Mask of the Red Death.”

About the Artists

Called the “Yo-Yo Ma of the harp,” by Vogue Senior Editor Corey Seymour, Schubert Club’s 2022-2023 Featured Artist Bridget Kibbey is in high demand for her innovative, virtuosic performances that expand the expressive range of the harp. As a soloist and collaborator with today’s top artists, she crosses genres to emphasize and elevate the harp’s role through centuries and cultures of music. 

As The New York Times says, “…she made it seem as though her instrument had been waiting all its life to explode with the gorgeous colors and energetic figures she was getting from it.”

Kibbey has received a prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Salon de Virtuosi SONY Recording Grant. She is the winner of the Premiere Prix at the Journées de les Harpes Competition in Arles, France, the Concert Artists Guild competition, and the Juilliard School’s Peter Mennin Prize for Artistic Excellence and Leadership. Schubert Club audiences will remember Ms. Kibbey from her Schubert Club Mix appearance with Chalaca, an ensemble that explores explores the confluence of cultures found in South America and the Caribbean. 

The Calidore String Quartet has been praised by the New York Times for its “deep reserves of virtuosity and irrepressible dramatic instinct.” The Los Angeles Times described the quartet as “astonishing,” their playing “shockingly deep,” approaching “the kind of sublimity other quartets spend a lifetime searching” and praised its balance of “intellect and expression.” The Washington Post has said that “Four more individual musicians are unimaginable, yet these speak, breathe, think and feel as one.” More information at: www.calidorestringquartet.com