Latest Releases

Lamenting Earth, the latest release from GRAMMY® Award-winning tenor Nicholas Phan, in collaboration with The Jasper Quartet and his long-time performing partner pianist Myra Huang, explores humanity’s interaction with nature as expressed through composers of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Franz Schubert’s songs evoke images of water, stillness, and solitude as mirrors of human emotion. Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, drawing on A. E. Housman’s poetry, places the individual within vast cycles of time and landscape – hills, wind, and earth – which persist beyond human joy and grief alike. Ives’s Housatonic at Stockbridge memories, hymns, and the river blend together into a shimmering meditation on transcendence, where nature becomes a spiritual threshold rather than a backdrop.

21st century responses include Patrick Castillo’s Skyline Palimpsest, an homage to New York City, once his hometown, that reflects on how nature’s effects may shape the future of the metropolis. The title track by Canadian-born composer Vivian Fung, pairs American writer Claire Wahmanholm’s poem “O” – which has been described as a lament, an elegy, and a clarion call to action – with Gen Z-ers urgent written responses to climate change.

Nicholas Phan’s burnished tone and passion for vocal chamber music bring vivid beauty to the range of repertoire that shares a central theme.

Insects and Machines
Quartets 1-4 of Vivian Fung

JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung is renowned for her virtuosic and arresting compositions. The Jasper SQ releases an album this fall of her string quartets, which span the totality of her career - the first quartet completed in 2003 (shortly after completing her doctoral degree at the Juilliard School) and the fourth completed in 2019. Though there is a clear compositional evolution in Fung’s four quartets, her fearlessness and mastery of string writing are on display in each work. The four string quartets together in one program inspire a totality of experiences, from mystery and anguish to unbridled and wild joy.

Repertoire:
Vivian Fung | String Quartet No. 1
Vivian Fung | String Quartet No. 2
Vivian Fung | String Quartet No. 3
Vivian Fung | String Quartet No. 4 “Insects and Machines

“…a rewarding new album covering [Vivian Fung’s] four string quartets, played with a beautiful sense of color and SUBSTANCE by the Jasper String Quartet.”

- Classical Modern Music

“… a precise, energetic, technically unimpeachable performance by the Jasper String Quartet.”

-All About the Arts

“If you want to get a good snapshot of composer Vivian Fung’s chamber music, this excellent recording by the Jasper String Quartet will reveal exactly how talented Fung is.”

-Cultural Attache

The Jasper String Quartet with composer Vivian Fung, Producer Dan Merceruio and Sound Engineer Daniel Shores in the Sono Luminus Studio.

Listen to Insects and Machines

All Recordings

Screen Shot 2021-06-03 at 12.02.24 PM.png

Listen here

Jasper String Quartet and Jupiter String Quartet
This collaborative album with the Jupiter String Quartet, released on Marquis Classics and produced by Grammy-winner Judith Sherman, features the world premiere recording of Dan Visconti's Eternal Breath (2011); Felix Mendelssohn's Octet in E-flat, Op. 20 (1825); and Osvaldo Golijov's Last Round (1996). Visconti's Eternal Breath was commissioned by family of members of the Jasper and Jupiter Quartets, and targets the album's underlying theme of friendship, family, and joy.

Repertoire:
Felix Mendelssohn | Octet in E-flat major, Op. 20
Dan Visconti | Eternal Breath
Osvaldo Golijov | Last round

Released: February 5, 2021