Legendary composer for stage and screen John Williams has admired the United States Marine Band (“The President’s Own”) since childhood, and in recent decades, the maestro and ensemble’s mutual admiration has deepened amidst a series of collaborations marking the group’s major anniversaries. The culmination of this twenty-year relationship was Williams’s return to conduct the band’s 225th anniversary gala concert in …

The latest album by the Calidore String Quartet weaves together a panoramic portrait of American musical expression across the 20th and 21st centuries spanning Samuel Barber’s lyrical String Quartet No. 1 (famous for its iconic Adagio movement), Wynton Marsalis’s jazz-inflected At the Octoroon Balls, and John Williams’s With Malice Toward None — here in its world premiere string quartet version. …

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “brilliant” and “superb,” SAKURA Cello Quintet (Stella Cho, Michael Kaufman, Yoshika Masuda, Zachary Mowitz, and Peter Myers) explores great music of the past through dazzling arrangements on familiar works, and continually expands the five-cello repertoire through commissioning new works. The group’s name, SAKURA, is a tribute to their mentor, cellist Ralph Kirshbaum, whose …