The Isidore String Quartet performs Thursday, May 14, at 7 p.m. at Hahn Hall as part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Hear & Now series.
Isidore String Quartet
Adrian Steele, violin
Phoenix Avalon, violin
Devin Moore, viola
Joshua McClendon, cello
On this episode of Air Time, violinists Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon discuss the formation of the Isidore String Quartet, tracing their origins from Juilliard and summer festivals to a Banff Competition win and a rapidly rising international profile. They reflect on their debut album, Adorations, a program shaped by a shared sense of musical “love” across Haydn, Mendelssohn, Barber and Florence Price, and describe their commitment to balancing precision with the spontaneity of live performance.
The conversation explores the quartet’s artistic ethos, inspired in part by the Juilliard String Quartet: treating “the old as the new and the new as the old,” and approaching rehearsal as a space of curiosity, discovery and deep listening. Steele and Avalon also discuss their upcoming Santa Barbara program, which pairs Haydn, Ligeti, and Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, joined by guest cellist Sterling Elliott, and consider how collaboration expands the ensemble’s identity in performance.
Along the way, they share insights into the emotional terrain of Schubert, the physical and philosophical dimensions of quartet playing and the evolving energy of today’s chamber music landscape.
Charles Donelan
Welcome, everyone, to UCSB Arts & Lectures Air Time. This week, my guests are Phoenix Avalon and Adrian Steele. They are violinists in the Isidore String Quartet. They’re going to be here on Thursday, May 14, at seven o’clock at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall, and they are part of the Hear & Now series.
So welcome Adrian and Phoenix. Thank you for joining me, and we’re very excited about this. I have listened to Adorations, which is the title of your very recent release, and it’s been on repeat at my house and in my car and everywhere else I listen. Beautiful, amazing music, congratulations. Maybe you want to start by talking a little bit about how you came together. You were all students. Oh, and let’s mention, also, before we get any further, the other members of the group, Devin Moore, the violist and Joshua McClendon, the cellist. And on this date, May 14, in Santa Barbara, you’re going to be joined by Sterling Elliot, a wonderful cellist, and you’re going to play the Schubert string quintet, which is one of my all-time favorite pieces of music. All right, so let’s let Adrian tell us a little bit about coming together as a quartet and where things started to kind of pop off for you folks.
Adrian Steele
Yeah, so we all kind of met in these different places, a lot of summer festivals. I met Devin and Josh in 2018 at the Aspen Music Festival, and then I know that Phoenix and Josh met in 2016 I think, at the Meadow Mount festival in upstate New York, and then Josh, Phoenix, and I were all in the same class at Juilliard together, and Devin was uptown at the Manhattan School of Music when we started in 2018. And having known Devin and Josh from the Aspen festival, we kind of read together for a while, and then Devin transferred down to be with us at Juilliard, and then we played together for a while before the pandemic happened. And then after that, we were kind of back together at the 2021 Kneisel Music Festival up in Maine, where my teacher, Laurie Smukler, was the artistic director, and we were incredibly fortunate to work with Joel Krosnick on Bartók’s first string quartet, which was kind of, I think the moment that we were all just like, ‘Oh, this is really amazing.’ And I think we could do this. And I think we had so much inspiration working that summer with him that we, you know, made a bunch of tapes, sent them to Banff, and then did Banff in 2022 and that, you know, worked out very well for us.
Charles Donelan
You won that Banff competition, which is a very prestigious thing to do. And also, I just want to mark for everyone how important a performer and just sort of figure in the music world the late Joel Krosnick was. A great teacher and key person in the whole Juilliard program for many years. And also how in your quartet you call yourself, Isidore, and that’s in part, a tribute to another longtime Juilliard Quartet player, maybe Phoenix, you can express, I know I’ve heard this in other places or read it about you, but how you took inspiration, not just from these individuals, but from the ethos, the kind of concept of the Juilliard String Quartet.
Phoenix Avalon
Yeah, I mean, I think as a quartet, we’ve all studied with almost every living member of the JSQ. So we’ve had a lot of Juilliard Quartet ideas and curiosity around how we play and how we shape everything. And I think that we kind of adopted their motto as well, of kind of treating the old as the new and the new as the old. So kind of always looking at something, whether it’s a very old piece with a kind of new fresh light. I’m looking at the score, really trying to find how you want to present it right now, and then also treating newer pieces with the same kind of respect and reverence that you would treat a late Beethoven quartet. And I think that kind of plays into the way that we rehearse and the way we at least like to, you know, go about playing and programming and all that as well.
Charles Donelan
I know that you worked with Joel Krosnick on some of the late Beethoven quartets, and I cannot think of a more profound sort of musical experience than that, just incredible. You’re going to play a Haydn piece, the Opus 76 in the program here, and you also have a Haydn piece on the Adorations album. Maybe, Adrian, I’m going to come back to you, and can you tell us about it? Adorations is kind of a striking title for a debut, or for any record. Why did you choose that title, and what does that say about the way you approach the music on the album?
Adrian Steele
I think coming into this kind of first recording that we had, we wanted to create kind of a portrait of music that we loved as a group and that also kind of defined us as we kind of came into being. And obviously, you know, Adorations is the title of the Florence Price work on the album, and that’s one of our favorite pieces that we’ve been playing for a long time, that we played as an encore for years. We still do, but we played it for years as an encore. But, I mean, there’s so much love in all of the music, I think, especially in Mendelssohn’s Quartet that he wrote right after he got married. And then, obviously there’s a great deal of sadness to [Samuel] Barber’s work, but you know, I think with sadness comes a great deal of love as well. And then, you know, Haydn is maybe the first thing that we really fell in love with as a group. I think Haydn is one of those things as a group that we just fell in love with his language so immediately. So, I think there’s a collection of pieces that deal with love and also that we love very deeply. So, I think that’s part of why this was kind of the impetus for the album and for how we named it.
Charles Donelan
So let me clarify. I’m going to restate that for my listeners, so that they get it. The Florence Price piece is titled Adorations, but it’s also an attitude, maybe Phoenix, you can pick up on this and tell me a little bit. You know, something else I really enjoyed. I was so pleased when I found that there is a video of your performance at the Library of Congress on YouTube, and I had a great time watching that. And I thought, first of all, congratulations. What an honor to be chosen to play at that Stradivari anniversary concert. And maybe Phoenix, you could talk a little bit about that experience, because that’s also it was Brahms in this instance, but there’s some admiration, I think, was the word used in that setting and you played some really amazing arrangements that were created by your violist Devin Moore. Is that right?
Phoenix Avalon
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was an absolutely incredible experience, and we were so honored to have that opportunity and chance, and the the instruments themselves, having six Stradivarius’s on one stage, and kind of that sound that that creates, and the possibilities that it opens for an ensemble is really, really amazing. So it was a big learning and inspiring experience, also playing with two members of the Brentano Quartet. The Brentano Quartet has also been big mentors for us. So having that, like in person, very close collaboration with people that we look up to so strongly, and kind of feeding off of their energy and their experience with that as well was a really magical experience for us.
Charles Donelan
Let’s get a little more into this idea of what happens when a quartet has an identity that they’ve established through long practice and performing together and really thinking about creating a group, naming yourself, but then, you know, you invite someone, maybe, in this instance, two other people, in. When we see you, we’re going to see you with Sterling Elliot, who’s got his own very strong identity as a cellist. How does that work? When you have a fifth or sixth member, is it the quartet with something added, or is it a whole new thing?
Phoenix Avalon
Yeah. I mean, I think ideally it’s a whole new thing. I mean, there is obviously the Quartet, and it has its own identity. But then even when we change places when we’re performing, it changes what the energy is within the group as well. Like we often think of the audience as the fifth member of the ensemble, so the hall plays a part, the audience plays a part. So then having other performers creates a whole different energy and experience around it. Which I think is important and good, because you don’t want it to be the same all of the time.
Charles Donelan
Adrian, one of the things that I found interesting in reading the copy about the Adorations album is that you were striving in the studio to retain a certain live music feeling. Could you maybe give some examples? Or just explain how that worked and what that’s about? Like what did you leave open in order to achieve that?
Adrian Steele
I think we went for some, some really long takes. I think we just kind of played everything a lot and really treated takes as not we’re going to focus on getting this one section really good and clean, but really creating kind of, you know, because in a live performance, you only do it once. So I think we wanted to capture the essence of play, the essence of experimentation that happens in live performance. Because the lovely thing about live performance is that it never gets heard again, or at least if it’s not being recorded. And I think we tried to be very conscious about not losing that sense of exploration in the recording process. And I think it’s sometimes easy, because the four of us are very perfectionist, and we want things to be perfect, so I think it’s natural for us to kind of get bogged down and that wasn’t perfectly together, that wasn’t perfectly in tune, or we, you know, we weren’t using the exact same amount of … you know, there’s so many things that you can get detailed about, but I think really making sure that the overall narrative and the arc of the pieces were kind of paramount in our recording process.
Charles Donelan
So when you say something like “adoration,” that implies a certain amount of reverence, but you’re also, from what you just said, not interested in being perfect. It’s more adoration in the sense of reverence, in the spirit of what’s happening, or in the moment, rather than in the kind of sculpted, overdubbed or whatever studio atmosphere. I’m actually going to pivot a little bit, if it’s alright with you, and I want to give you some context, because we are so fortunate at UCSB Arts & Lectures that we have an established tradition that goes back quite a ways. First of all, this series that you’re on, Hear & Now, is our series where we get to know musicians. It’s typically a Santa Barbara debut. And I think this is Santa Barbara debut. Have either of you played here? Have you ever been at the Music Academy or in Santa Barbara before?
Adrian Steele and Phoenix Avalon
No, it’s so great. This will be our first time.
Charles Donelan
[Hahn Hall] is such a great hall. I think you’re really going to love it. It’s a beautiful room. The acoustics are amazing. It’s a very special place. And let me tell you a couple of things, and I don’t want to overwhelm you, and, you know, I’m not necessarily interested in making comparisons, but I do think for me, especially because I’m going to all these concerts and probably will introduce you and do some of the curtain speeches and things, I just love hearing the different groups and thinking about what’s happening with string quartets, because I think string quartets are incredibly exciting, especially now.
So, last year in Hear & Now, we had a group called Owls, and that’s Ayane [Kozasa] and Paul [Wiancko] and Alexi [Kenney] [and Gabriel Cabezas]. And that group is really interesting, because they’re a string quartet with two cellos and one violin. So that’s one thing that’s just completely like, I don’t know that there’s another one of those. But we have also got, actually, a week from tomorrow, we’ve got the Danish String Quartet coming through, and they are bringing 45 or 50 women of the Danish National Girls’ Choir with them, and they’re doing a new David Lang piece that we co-commissioned for String Quartet and Girls Choir. And I talked to Frederik from Danish last week about that, and he was saying that there’s parts of it that remind him of the Schubert Quintet. I was like, that’s a pretty big claim. So we’ve got them.
And then also we have Kronos and all three of these quartets, Danish, Isidore and Kronos, that’s all in this spring session, all within the next, like, couple of months. So you can imagine how lucky we feel to be able to experience this level of music making, and especially just to be in touch with what’s happening with string quartets right now. I mean, am I exaggerating in saying that this is the most exciting part of music, almost for me, it’s just, it feels like there’s a lot of creativity going on, and especially around these extended formations. And maybe I’ll give you a specific question, rather than just rambling about what we’re doing. What do you think about the quartet with the two cellos? It would be a tough break for you two. Someone would have to sit out, right? Let me put it in a more normal way, or at least try to. The Schubert Quintet’s unusual because usually it’s the violists that double right? In the Mozart and other quintets. But what makes that sort of bottom-heavy quintet format special?
Phoenix Avalon
I mean, I think everyone loves the cello. Cello sounds awesome. I mean, it’s so resonant, it’s so rich. I think we can all kind of agree a lot of times that the cello generally sounds the best. So I think having a quintet with two cellos, and I think that’s what makes the Schubert Quintet also so incredible is having that richness, having that double amount of bass and resonance is so exciting. Not to say that viola quintets aren’t equally as exciting and wonderful with those inner voices, but there is something about such a richness.
Adrian Steele
Yeah, I think one of the funny things about our group is that we all, the four of us, all started on violin, but I think if we all had to choose an instrument, we would all choose the cello.
Charles Donelan
Oh, how funny. Now, you just trade off.
Adrian Steele
Yeah.
Charles Donelan
Right, with you it’s sometimes Adrian is the first violin and sometimes Phoenix is the first. Now, do you actually get up and move when, when you trade, or do you just stay in your seats?
Adrian Steele
We get up and move.
Charles Donelan
Because that’s part of it, right?
Adrian Steele
I guess when we’re in our rehearsal studio, we don’t move, but….
Charles Donelan
But if you’re on stage, yeah, you do. Okay, I’m going to ask you about a specific part. It’s kind of the obvious one, the Adagio in the Schubert. We had the Danish String Quartet come through in 2024 with Johannes Rostamo, the Finnish cellist, and it’s just such an incredible piece of music. I don’t know anything quite like it. It feels very exposed. The dynamics require so much control and trust you will obviously both do a much better job of talking about this than I will, but tell me about that part of that piece of music from your perspective. It’s such a challenge, but it’s also so special.
Phoenix Avalon
Yeah, I mean, I think Schubert has a particularly incredible skill for that kind of a part, that kind of a feeling and emotion that he creates in a lot of his pieces. I think even in more solo works, like the Schubert Fantasy [in C, D. 934] has that kind of violin, has that kind of character and energy as well. Right now we’re also playing Rosamunde [D. 797], and that has some of that as well, but it’s tragically innocent in a sort of way, where it’s, it’s so hopeful, and because of so much hope, it’s also tragic, and it’s in its own way, and very, very deeply sad, but always with this sense of wanting the best out of humanity. So, it’s, I think it’s a very special ability that Schubert, maybe a few other composers, but I think mainly Schubert was, was the main one to be able to express that particular feeling. For me, at least.
Adrian Steele
I think one of the interesting things that I that I love about Schubert’s language is that I think he almost never found a way to reconcile those two in a way, and I think we associate Beethoven and especially his late quartets, with a lot of those similar feelings in terms of just being kind of these godlike worlds, kind of large pieces. But I think one of the things that’s almost so incredibly human about Schubert is that he will have these kind of juxtaposed ideas. And I think the lovely thing is that sometimes they never get resolved. And even, like in the Rosamunde Quartet that we’re working on now, like it starts out, like in this really brooding A minor, and then by the end, it’s just kind of this dance thing that it’s really hard to know how to reconcile those two, right? The quintet has almost a similar arc to it, in a way. I think a lot of his pieces kind of have that really incredible duality that never quite gets resolved. And I think that’s almost the most heartbreaking.
Charles Donelan
When I was talking to Frederik about this he made that comparison where he said the Lang piece has this quality that reminds him of the Schubert Quintet. And I was like, well, that’s kind of a big claim, you know, can you be more specific in his things? And he said, well, you know, in the Adagio of the Schubert Quintet, there’s moments where you really are kind of just lost in space and time, it stretches so much, but it’s also so grounded, as Phoenix put it, in such a clear emotional message that you don’t feel lost in the sense of, you know exactly where you’re at from the expressive point of view. But again, coming back that is just, you’re playing very softly, you know, and you don’t have a lot of rhythm to rely on. There’s not a lot of blending. People are just very vulnerable, I think from the players it requires great communication.
So maybe that’s another thing you could just talk about, generally speaking, and it would be especially great if you could maybe bring up Joshua and Devin in describing your experience, and I’ll just put it in the most general way of you know string quartets, they’re all about agreement and ensemble understanding. But they also, to me at least, represent, they embody negotiation. I hear a great quartet composition as not necessarily a contest, but the voices are in dialogue, and they’re negotiating, the open, the close, you know how things work with who’s going to say what, and where we’re going. So maybe you could talk about what it’s like to work with the other musicians in the group, and you can each pick one, or both talk about both, I don’t care.
Adrian Steele
Yeah. I mean, I think everyone in the Quartet, there’s a lot of different personalities. And I think the one thing that we, I guess, we don’t think about, I think we try not to think about negotiating too much.
Charles Donelan
Maybe that is in the practice room rather than, I guess, concert
Adrian Steele
When we’re really thinking about working together. I think a lot of it is, what can we learn from each other? And I think a lot of the times, especially when we haven’t learned a piece yet, or when we’re putting something together, it’s, I think, the most beneficial to come at it from a lens of kind of extreme curiosity, and in a curiosity that might bend a little too far towards the curious, and I think that’s the place where you discover things. And I think that’s what we love about playing with each other, is that we’ll discover things, and sometimes we don’t like the things that we discover, and that’s okay. And then obviously you can talk about why you did not like the thing that you just discovered, but it’s important to discover why you didn’t like it, and I think that’s kind of the place that we always start from, or try to start from. Yeah, Phoenix can talk more.
Charles Donelan
I loved hearing Devin talk about his arrangements in the curtain speech he made down at the Library of Congress. He’s got a really interesting way of thinking about music, especially thinking about Brahms. But go ahead, Phoenix.
Phoenix Avalon
Yeah. I mean, I think to go off what Adrian was saying, obviously there are parts where we disagree with each other, and I think that’s almost more important than agreeing on something a lot of the time. So it starts with that kind of discourse. But I think there’s a very clear feeling that even if we don’t agree musically, that we want something to happen the same way. There’s a very, very clear, visceral reaction when we all feel something the same way, and we all have the same intention with it, and we can, like, breathe in the same way and actually go about it the same way. And I think we all know that feeling, and we can lock into it, or that’s what we’re searching for, and then the rest of it is almost semantics in a weird way. A lot of the time we’re talking about the same thing. We want it to feel natural. We want it to feel sung. And we’re just going about it in so many different ways, and that’s where confusion can kind of happen, or disagreements can happen, but the actual core of what we’re trying to get at is often the same thing, and then we can use each other’s ways of getting there to fully understand the big picture in a better way, more complete way, but that feeling of actually all having the same intention, I think, is a very like visceral feeling for all of us.
Charles Donelan
Now, how about Sterling Elliot? Have you worked with him before? Is this going to be the first time, or has that collaboration been ongoing?
Phoenix Avalon
It’s the first time that we’ve played with him as a quartet, but we’ve known him throughout all of college. I met him when I was 16 or something, so we’ve known each other for a while, and we’ve read together and all these things, but it’s the first time as an actual collaboration.
Adrian Steele
Yeah, he was actually in my suite in the dorms. So I’ve, yeah, we’ve known him for a while. He’s absolutely an incredible musician, obviously.
Charles Donelan
So he’s part of your cohort.
Adrian Steele
And we’ve met at reading parties. We’ll read together, and that’s always a lot of fun.
Charles Donelan
So that’s great. I was a West sider for many years before I moved out here, and I miss it. I’m going to ask a couple more big questions, and I’m going to do a few kind of fun questions that I like to do at the end. And it’s been really good talking to you guys, and like I said before, I’m so excited about this particular concert because I love hearing the new string quartets. I really like your record, and I love the program that you’ve got for us with the Ligeti in between the Haydn and the Schubert. That’s just a dream night for me, personally and for us here.
All right, so how does this program, which really is, you know, first of all, ambitious, because it’s a big range, right? And it’s not just that. It’s Haydn and Ligeti, which is already, you know, a very Juilliard Quartet, kind of a move to pair those. But then also to say, yeah, and we’re also going to do the quintet on the same program. How does that express where you are as a group right now?
Adrian Steele
I think we’re always looking to juxtapose the new and the old. Like Phoenix was saying earlier, that’s something that the Julliard Quartet is incredibly good at, and something that we’ve kind of learned from them as well. I think there’s actually an incredible amount of connection between the way that the Ligeti operates, and the way that Schubert operates. And there’s, I call them portals, and I don’t know quite what I mean by that, but in Schubert’s music, he’s always repeating things and expecting a different result. And I think Ligeti has a lot of that same kind of I wouldn’t call it a rage, necessarily, but there’s also an incredible duality between stasis and movement. And in Ligeti’s music, there’s like … the beginning of the fifth movement of the Ligeti, for example, just starts with us oscillating on a D sharp and an F sharp, and you don’t really know where you are. And there’s that, that level of uncertainty that you could go anywhere. And I find that both in Ligeti’s language and in Schubert’s language, and there’s also, obviously, in Ligeti the fourth movement is this kind of incredibly brutal two minutes. And there’s, there’s a certain rage that I think that that Schubert accesses, that’s quite avant-garde that Ligeti obviously accesses in his language. But also, I think the lyricism of the Haydn and the Schubert really pair well together. And obviously Haydn kind of brought us into the string age of the Quartet itself. So finding a way to bring that into the avant-garde of Ligeti, and also just Schubert’s kind of reinvention of that form, honestly, with the Cello Quintet, I think it’s there. There are a lot of different things happening that we want to access.
Charles Donelan
Yeah, what do you think, Phoenix?
Phoenix Avalon
What he said. We try to go for programs like this. I think it’s a model that we like, kind of figuring out how we can pair different narratives, different voices, different ways of experiencing music in one program, with the ultimate goal of realizing that it is all connected, and it is trying to get to the same story of humanity in general.
Charles Donelan
Yeah, I’m going to throw something in, because what I see from my perspective on things is that I love this program, because this is a lot further along than a debut type of program. This feels like what I like about this series, which is we try to catch people who are accelerating, but not necessarily getting started, which I think is a good description of maybe where your group is. It’s like, that’s the first album, but it feels like a later stage than a lot of typical first albums. And especially, I gotta say, the Haydn on Adorations is out of this world. That’s really, really beautiful, very original. You know, just listening to it, I was like, “Wow, these guys don’t sound like anybody else, and in the best possible way.” All right, we’re gonna do the “podcast questions,” which is what I call them, Phoenix. Do you have a favorite philosopher at the moment? Are you engaging in philosophy at this time?
Adrian Steele
He’s the one to ask that question too.
Charles Donelan
I have done a little homework on this.
Phoenix Avalon
Oh, man. I mean right now? That’s a difficult question. Right now, I’m about to start going into a Dostoevsky reading phase, so I’m looking forward to that, but right now, I’d say Lao Tzu. I guess that’s almost more quasi-religion, but I think it’s more of a philosophy, and I think it’s everything. It’s everything, yeah, but I think especially the more I get into quartet stuff and music in general, and also how you use your body to plan everything, I think there’s something about that philosophy that is kind of all encompassing, and it translates to everything that you do, and I think it relates to music in a way, that music is just an expression of everything else in life as well. It’s the way we live our life is also the way that we’re going to play, and vice versa. So, I think kind of going into that as I’m thinking about my own playing has been helpful.
Charles Donelan
That’s such a great answer, because I can intuitively feel that’s a great connection, and that’s one of my favorite works of wisdom, right? Adrian, how about your bagel order? Do you have a bagel order? Or maybe you’re gluten-free and you don’t eat bagels.
Adrian Steele
So I live two blocks away from Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side. So when I go there, I get a sturgeon sandwich on an everything bagel, open face with everything and a side order of latkes and a coffee and an orange juice. That’s my ideal bagel order.
Charles Donelan
That’s a good bagel order. You get A-plus in Manhattan with that order. And I’m so happy to hear that people can still live on the Upper West Side. You know, a lot of times I talk to people and they’re like, Brooklyn, ride and die or whatever. All right, I’m almost done, but I’ve got one more, and it’s again, New York related. Where does Isidore go to eat? Do you ever all four of you have to go someplace and get some food? And what do people order? And I’ll leave it at that. Is there a classic place for, like, after rehearsal to go?
Phoenix Avalon
And I’m not sure we’ve actually gone to eat in New York together. That might be a bit much.
Adrian Steele
We’ve been to K-Town together. Yes, okay, yeah, actually, yeah, Korean food has been a big source of collective joy.
Charles Donelan
For some bibimbap or a barbecue maybe down on 32nd Street? That’s a great place to go, and I love it that they’re open late.
Adrian Steele
Yeah, Phoenix knows the good the good spots.
Charles Donelan
Very cool. And now finally I need to set you against one another before we sign off. Who makes the best food?
Phoenix Avalon
Oh, Adrian for sure, right? Adrian for sure, no doubt.
Adrian Steele
I don’t want to brag, but I am a good chef.
Charles Donelan
You are a culinary artist as well as a musician. Time invested in making good food is time well spent! Thank you so much, both of you. This has been a blast. I’m really looking forward to meeting you in person and hearing you play.
And this has been Air Time, the UCSB Arts & Lectures podcast. And we will have the Isidore string quartet with us on Thursday, May 14. The show’s at seven o’clock. It’s at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall, and it’s part of the Arts & Lectures Hear & Now series. Thank you, Phoenix Avalon and Adrian Steele, we’ll see you in a little over a month.
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