The Telegraph Quartet brings its mix of classical standards and less familiar 20th- and 21st-century repertoire to Coral Gables Thursday, Oct. 1, for a 7:30 p.m. concert at Newman Recital Hall in the University of Miami’s Knight Center for Music Innovation.
Formed in 2013, the quartet has built its reputation without settling into a single corner of the chamber-music repertory. Haydn, Beethoven and other staples sit alongside Schoenberg, Weinberg and living composers, and the group has premiered or co-commissioned works by Osvaldo Golijov, John Harbison, Robert Sirota and Richard Festinger.
That range has brought praise from major critics. The San Francisco Chronicle has described the ensemble as “powerfully adept” with “a combination of brilliance and subtlety,” while The New York Times praised its playing for “elegance and pinpoint control.”
A quartet with competition credentials
The quartet’s honors came early.
Less than a year after forming, Telegraph won the Grand Prize and Senior String Division Gold Medal at the 2014 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Two years later, it won the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award, one of the better-known prizes in American chamber music.
Since then, the ensemble has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre and major festivals in the United States and Europe. Its collaborators have included pianists Leon Fleisher and Simone Dinnerstein, cellists Norman Fischer and Bonnie Hampton, violinist Ian Swensen and the St. Lawrence and Henschel quartets.
Thursday’s lineup is Eric Chin and Joseph Maile on violins, Pei-Ling Lin on viola and Jeremiah Shaw on cello. The foursome also serves as Quartet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where its three-year residency began in fall 2024. The musicians coach student chamber ensembles, lead seminars and mentor students alongside their own performance schedule.
The group’s style is polished without being overly restrained.
In a 2022 interview, Maile described the quartet as aiming to leave audiences with a strong sense of physical energy. “Sometimes you’ll catch us almost banging on the piano as we play Haydn,” he said. “We don’t hold back.”
The comment fits the way the quartet has presented itself throughout its career: technically exacting, but intent on making even familiar repertory sound immediate rather than museum-like.
A recording project centered on the 20th century
The quartet’s recordings offer another window into that approach.
Its ongoing 20th Century Vantage Points series on Azica Records explores string quartets from a century the musicians have said they felt drawn to from the ensemble’s beginning.
The first installment, Divergent Paths, released in 2023, paired Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major with Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1 in D minor. The second, Edge of the Storm, released in 2025, turns to the years surrounding World War II through quartets by Grażyna Bacewicz, Benjamin Britten and Mieczysław Weinberg.
Edge of the Storm has since been named Chamber Music America’s 2026 Album of the Year.
That recording project reflects the balance Telegraph brings to its concerts: familiar forms alongside music that sits outside the standard handful of quartets most audiences hear repeatedly.
The program remains under wraps
Frost’s current event listing does not identify Thursday’s repertoire, describing only a “precise program of string repertoire.” The university lists Chin and Maile on violin, Lin on viola and Shaw on cello and provides links for a program and program notes, but the repertoire itself is not published in the event description.
That leaves the exact selections as the one missing piece of the evening.
What is well established is the ensemble’s breadth. Its repertory regularly crosses from the classical canon into the Second Viennese School, wartime European composers and newly commissioned American music, often placing works from different periods in conversation with one another.
If you go…
The Telegraph Quartet performs at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, at Robert and Judi Prokop Newman Recital Hall in the Knight Center for Music Innovation, 5513 San Amaro Drive on the University of Miami campus.
Tickets are $15, $25 and $30. The university also lists a livestream for the concert.
Newman Recital Hall, opened as part of the Knight Center in 2023, seats about 200 people and was designed specifically for acoustically detailed performance. For a string quartet, that scale puts listeners close enough to hear the individual lines, attacks and shifts in color that can disappear in a larger hall.
