On the evening of October 20, 2026, the Foellinger Great Hall at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts will host a concert that puts a brand-new work for an unusual combination of instruments alongside two landmarks of the modern string quartet repertoire. The Jupiter String Quartet, artists-in-residence at the University of Illinois School of Music and Krannert Center, will be joined by faculty bassoonist Ben Roidl-Ward for the US premiere of a new quintet for bassoon and strings by the London-based American composer Arlene Sierra. The 7:30 p.m. performance is part of the university's annual New Music Festival of contemporary classical works, and admission is free.
The Jupiter Quartet is, in a literal sense, a family affair. Violinists Mélanie Clapiès and Meg Freivogel share the stage with violist Liz Freivogel, Meg's older sister, and cellist Daniel McDonough, who is Meg's husband and Liz's brother-in-law. The group formed in 2001 in Cleveland, where its members studied with players from the Cleveland Quartet and spent summers at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Over more than two decades it has grown into what The New Yorker called "an ensemble of eloquent intensity" that "has matured into one of the mainstays of the American chamber-music scene." Its touring has taken it to Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, London's Wigmore Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress, Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes, and Seoul's Sejong Chamber Hall, among many others. The quartet has been in residence at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2012, where its members also direct the chamber music program, and it has built a reputation for commissioning and premiering new work rather than treating contemporary music as an occasional sideline.
That commitment is the thread running through this program. The centerpiece is Sierra's quintet, a piece that hands the bassoon a role it rarely gets in chamber music: equal partner to a full string quartet rather than the bass line or the comic relief. Sierra is a London-based American composer whose catalogue has been commissioned and performed by the Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Seattle, and Utah Symphonies, the New York Philharmonic, the BBC Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, with appearances at the BBC Proms, Tanglewood, Aldeburgh, and Huddersfield. Her music, as her own biography describes it, draws on birdsong, insect calls, classical architecture, military strategy, and game theory, and critics have praised its "highly flexible and distinctive style," ranging from "exquisiteness and restrained power" to "combative and utterly compelling." Her orchestral showpiece Moler was nominated for a Latin GRAMMY, and Bridge Records has released a series of portrait discs of her work.
The bassoonist onstage is himself a significant figure in new music. Ben Roidl-Ward joined the Illinois faculty as assistant professor of bassoon in fall 2023 and was named by The Washington Post as one of 23 artists "changing the sound of classical music." He is the bassoonist of Chicago's Ensemble Dal Niente and served as a Contemporary Leader at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland from 2021 to 2025, where he also coached in the Lucerne Festival Academy. His performing life spans the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and he holds principal or co-principal chairs with the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Illinois Symphony, the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, and Sinfonia Da Camera. He has commissioned numerous works for his instrument and, by his own count, has taken part in the premieres of more than 200 compositions. A US premiere of a new bassoon quintet is, in other words, exactly the kind of project he has spent his career building toward.
The rest of the program sets Sierra's premiere in conversation with two works from very different moments. Shulamit Ran's Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory is the composer's third string quartet, commissioned by Music Accord for the Pacifica Quartet in 2013; Ran, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote it as a response to the Holocaust, and it has become one of the more widely traveled American quartets of the past decade. Closing the evening is Alban Berg's Lyric Suite, written a century ago as a veiled homage to the composer's brief and concealed love affair with a married woman. Berg encoded the affair in the music itself, quoting a Baudelaire poem and weaving a musical anagram of his lover's name into the score, and the piece's private program stayed hidden for decades. Placed after a world of new sound and a meditation on memory, the Lyric Suite makes a case that the avant-garde and the early twentieth century are closer relatives than concert programs usually admit.
The setting for all this is one of the more distinctive concert halls on an American campus. Krannert Center for the Performing Arts opened in 1969 as a gift from industrialist Herman C. Krannert and his wife Ellnora, and it spans seven acres with four theaters and an outdoor amphitheater. The Foellinger Great Hall, its largest indoor space, is known for an acoustically warm, shoebox-style design that suits chamber music particularly well, and it has long been the flagship stage for the university's visiting artists and its own ensembles.
The New Music Festival, the umbrella under which this concert falls, is an annual fixture of the School of Music's calendar, gathering faculty, students, and guest artists around contemporary repertoire. This performance is the first of three local concerts the Jupiter Quartet will give in the series, and the quartet is also scheduled to appear at Stage 5 in the Krannert Center lobby on Wednesday, October 14 at 1:00 p.m. for an Artists Talk, offering a chance to hear the players discuss the music before the concert itself.
For listeners in Champaign-Urbana, the practical appeal is hard to overstate. A free general-admission concert in the Foellinger Great Hall, featuring a quartet that tours the world's major halls, a bassoonist the Washington Post singled out as a force in the field, and the first American hearing of a piece by a composer of Sierra's stature, is an unusual combination of access and ambition. The music starts at 7:30 p.m. at 500 South Goodwin Avenue in Urbana.