Quartet San Francisco is a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen. The group played their first concert in 2001 and has recorded five albums. Playing a wide range of music genres including jazz, blues, tango, swing, funk, and pop, the group challenges the traditional classical music foundation of the string quartet.
Quartet San Francisco won a tango music competition in New York in 2004, and their albums have been nominated five times for Grammy Awards: three in the Best Classical Crossover Album category and two for Best Engineered Album, Classical.
Members
Quartet leader and violinist Jeremy Cohen founded the Quartet San Francisco as a forum to explore a multitude of musical styles that were important to him but were not being exercised in his work with other ensembles such as Turtle Island Quartet. Cohen produces the quartet's albums on his label, Violin Jazz. Classically trained under Itzhak Perlman and Anne Crowden, his playing style shows influences of violinists Fritz Kreisler, Joe Venuti, and Eddie South.
A native of Maine, Matthew Szemela joined the quartet in 2012. He has toured and recorded with singer-songwriter Nina Nastasia, recorded with Sufjan Stevens, and in 2006 served as concertmaster of the Hustla Symphony Orchestra for Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt 10th Anniversary Concert at Radio City Music Hall in New York. He has collaborated with tap dancer, actor, and choreographer Savion Glover on his production Classical Savion, and he has appeared with Sting, Dave Stewart, Lana Del Rey, Cassandra Wilson, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, guitarist Vernon Reid of Living Colour, Susan Sarandon, Beyoncé Knowles, and Olivia Newton-John.
Chad Kaltinger, violist with QSF since 2012, grew up in Chicago and moved to San Francisco in 1997. He has been Principal Violist for Opera San Jose and the Santa Cruz Symphony and has toured in the US and Europe as a multi-instrumentalist with several singer-songwriters and bands. He studied privately at Northwestern University with Peter Slowik, at the University of Illinois with Emanuel Vardi, and at the Aspen Music Festival as a fellowship recipient with Heidi Castleman and Victoria Chiang.
Andrés Vera, a native of Puerto Rico, began playing with the quartet in 2015. At 17 he was invited to join the Miami Symphony Orchestra as a section cellist. He holds a B.A. degree from the University of Miami and an M.M. degree and post-graduate Professional Studies Diploma from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He studied with Ross Harbaugh, Jean-Michel Fonteneau, and Jennifer Culp. He is a founding member of the Cello Street Quartet, with whom he traveled in 2014 to Russia, Kosovo, and Hungary for the U.S. State Department.
Past members
Kelley Maulbetsch played cello for the quartet from 2011 to 2015. Kelley is a freelance performer and teacher in the Bay Area. She is a member of the Santa Cruz, Monterey, Napa, and Modesto symphonies. She is also a member of the Sarasota Opera Festival and the Utah Festival Opera. Kelley has participated in music festivals such as Tanglewood, the National Repertory Orchestra, and AIMS in Graz, Austria. She is a member of Duo Cantando and Tango Porteno. She was a string ensemble coach at the Nueva School, a private teacher, and a faculty member of the Community Music Center in San Francisco. She is also a certified Suzuki instructor. Kelley received her BM in Cello Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied under Richard Aaron. She has also studied with Irene Sharp.
Alisa Rose played violin for Quartet San Francisco from 2009 to 2012. Born in Wisconsin, she has played in bluegrass bands and at festivals such as Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco and the Strawberry Music Festival in Yosemite. She is director of a San Francisco Conservatory of Music program at a city elementary school and has written an instructional book aimed at music students aged seven to ten years old.
Keith Lawrence, member from March 2008 to 2012, began learning viola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the age of 11, then pursued undergraduate study at Oberlin Conservatory, taking instruction from Peter Slowik and Roger Chase. He attended the Henry Mancini Institute three years during his time at Oberlin. Until 2007, he studied at the DePaul University School of Music with Rami Solomonow.