Stanford's chamber music program got its spark in 1997, when the University began searching for a group of established performers with a passion for all types of music who could excite students and enrich the community’s musical life. Former provost Condoleezza Rice explains that she and others saw an ensemble-in-residence as a way for a well-rounded university to offer world-class arts, enhance the public profile of the music department and provide exceptional music teachers for broadly talented students.
Stanford chose the St. Lawrence String Quartet from a pool of some 80 chamber groups. “The SLSQ knocked everybody’s socks off,” says Rice, an accomplished pianist. “In addition to interacting well with the students, they were so innovative and interesting. They give 200-year-old music a new sound.”
It’s a sound reverberating around the Peninsula and beyond, in part through a Hewlett Foundation grant that funds a community outreach director for the quartet. The foundation president and former Law School dean Paul Brest calls the ensemble a jewel. “We’ll know if we were successful,” he says, “if the SLSQ is tenfold overbooked in years to come.”
