Orion Quartet to Retire at the End of the 2023/24 season

The quartet has been one of America's leading ensembles for the last 36 years

Following a fruitful 36-year period as one of America's leading chamber ensembles, the New York-based Orion Quartet has decided to retire at the conclusion of the 2023/24 season. The quartet is made up of brothers Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips (who rotate between the first and second violin positions), Steven Tenenbom (viola), and Timothy Eddy (cello). The group's founding violist was Catherine Metz, who stood down in 1993.

The quartet will play their final concert at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in Spring 2024, after which the players intend to continue their individual teaching and performing careers. At present, they work with students at The Juilliard School, The Curtis Institute of Music, The Manhattan School of Music, Mannes College, Queens College, Bard College, Rutgers University, and the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Established in 1987, the group took its name from the Orion constellation as a metaphor for the personality each musician brings to the group in its collective pursuit of the highest musical ideals. Alongside the established classics of the quartet canon, the ensemble quickly developed a reputation for regularly programming key contemporary works.

Over the course of three and a half decades, they have commissioned 20 new pieces, from composers such as Chick Corea, Brett Dean, Alexander Goehr, Aaron Jay Kernis, Leon Kirchner, Wynton Marsalis, Marc Neikrug, John Harbison, and Peter Lieberson. The group holds the music of Leon Kirchner in particular regard, and they are the dedicatees of Kirchner's fourth quartet.

A standout project of the quartet was Beethoven 2000 — a series of six free concerts presented by CMS as a “millennium gift to the city of New York” — in which the quartet performed all 16 Beethoven quartets as a cycle for the first time.

"Having had the privilege for so many years to explore and perform some of the greatest music ever written, we have come to feel that many of these works have actually become a part of our physical and spiritual being,” the members of the quartet said.

"We have chosen to leave our audiences with some final presentations that still fully articulate what we have experienced in this wondrous journey. We look forward to continuing to reach out to inspire people with our recordings, individual performances, and our love of teaching."