Officially formed in 1969 at the Juilliard School of Music, the Tokyo String Quartet traces its origins to the Toho School of Music in Tokyo. The founding members eventually came to America for further study with Robert Mann, Raphael Hillyer and Claus Adam. Soon after its formation, the quartet won numerous competitions inluding the Coleman Competition, the Munich Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. The Tokyo Quartet consists of Martin Beaver and Kikuei Ikeda (violins), Kazuhide Isomura (viola) and Clive Greensmith (cello). The quartet has gained international recognition, has a comprehensive catalogue of critically acclaimed recordings, performs over a hundred concerts worldwide each season, and established a distinguished teaching record.
Their schedule for this season includes performances in Germany, Switzerland, the UK, Italy, Spain, Luxemburg, Belgium and Holland and concerts in Warszawa and Istanbul. The ensemble will tour Australia and Mexico, appear in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and Kawasaki and return to the Toho Gakuen Graduate School of Music in Toyama for the annual string-quartet seminar. In July they will be teaching and performing at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo.
The Tokyo String Quartet has released more than 40 landmark recordings including the complete quartets of Beethoven, Schubert and Bartók. The quartet's recordings of Brahms, Debussy, Dvorák, Haydn, Mozart, Ravel and Schubert have earned such honours as the Grand Prix du Disque Montreux, "Best Chamber Music Recording of the Year" awards from both Stereo Review and Gramophone magazines and seven Grammy nominations.
The ensemble performs on the "Paganini Quartet", a group of renowned Stradivarius instruments named for legendary virtuoso Niccolò Paganini, who acquired and played them during the 19th century.