Photo credit: Lara St. John

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ulysses Quartet welcomes new member, violist Peter Dudek

April 2, 2024

NEW YORK -- The Ulysses Quartet announced today that violist Peter Dudek is joining the renowned, New York-based string quartet.

In making the announcement, the continuing founding members of the quartet said: “We are thrilled to welcome Peter, who is one of the most exciting up-and-coming musical talents today. We greatly appreciate his versatility in performance, brilliant virtuosity, infectious enthusiasm, and rich soulful music-making. We also bid farewell to violist Colin Brookes with gratitude for his artistry and vision as a founding member of our quartet, with fond wishes for his continued success.

Dudek has received first prize in several national competitions, including the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Discover National Chamber Music Competition and WDAV Young Chamber Musicians Competition.

In the course of his career, Dudek has appeared alongside such prominent artists as Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Roger Tapping. The Chicago native participates regularly in festivals around the globe, including Verbier in Switzerland, Keshet Eilon in Israel, the NAC Young Artists Program in Canada, and the Perlman Music Program in New York. He has also appeared as an orchestral musician under the batons of conductors including Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti and Christoph Eschenbach.

In addition to performing, Dudek enjoys a career as a coach and teacher. He currently serves as a teaching assistant in music theory at The Juilliard School and runs a private studio for violin and viola instruction. Through Project: Music Heals Us, he regularly teaches music theory to students in Nairobi, Kenya. Dudek began his viola studies with Lisa Chodorowski and Charles Pikler, and received his musical education at the University of Michigan and The Juilliard School, where he studied with Roger Tapping, Toby Appel, Molly Carr and Yizhak Schotten.

The Ulysses Quartet has been praised by The Strad for “the kind of chemistry many quartets long for, but rarely achieve.” Founded in 2015, the group won the grand prize and gold medal in the senior string division of the 2016 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and first prize in the 2018 Schoenfeld International String Competition. In 2017, the quartet finished first in the American Prize and won the Vietnam International Music Competition in 2019. Ulysses recently released their debut album, “Shades of Romani Folklore,” on the Navona label. Of the recording, Gramophone wrote that the quartet “promise[s] to bring as much sophistication, imagination and vitality to Beethoven’s other quartets as they will to music by a panoply of composers from long ago and today.”

The other members of the quartet consist of violinists Christina Bouey and Rhiannon Banerdt and cellist Grace Ho. Further information on the group and a schedule of its upcoming performances may be found on their website at www.ulyssesquartet.com.