Quartet Integra—Kyoka Misawa and Rintaro Kikuno on violins, Itsuki Yamamoto on viola, and cellist Ye Un Park—brings astonishing versatility and depth to music spanning the Classical, Romantic, Contemporary, and Renaissance eras.

Their album Beethoven, Ligeti & Lefkowitz [Pure DSD] opens with Beethoven’s final quartet, Op. 135, a late-Romantic yet subtly backward-glancing masterpiece premiered after the composer’s death, and continues with a riveting performance of Ligeti’s explosive yet unexpectedly beautiful String Quartet No. 2, a work the ensemble delivers with clarity, humor, and fearless energy.

The program concludes with David S. Lefkowitz’s Green Mountains, Now Black, a richly layered new work that intertwines Monteverdi quotations with the composer’s emotional response to the 2025 Los Angeles fires, blending historical resonance with urgent contemporary expression.

Celebrated as the most exciting young quartet to emerge from Japan (with Ye Un from Korea) since the storied Tokyo String Quartet, these musicians carry forward a lineage nurtured by mentors Martin Beaver and Clive Greensmith and shaped by intensive training at Suntory Hall’s Chamber Music Academy—an artistic inheritance they honor with rare insight, refinement, and fire.

Quartet Integra
Kyoka Misawa, Violin
Rintaro Kikuno, Violin
Itsuki Yamamoto, Viola
Ye Un Park, Cello