Verona Quartet with Steven Banks

The Verona Quartet plays the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center on Wednesday, December 9, with saxophonist Steven Banks joining them on stage. The program is titled Dialogismós: A Meditation in Music, and it's part of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society's 2026-27 season.

The set mixes a few familiar names with a good deal of new material. You'll hear Debussy's Syrinx and Mendelssohn's Ist es wahr, along with an arrangement of Mozart's Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370. The rest of the evening is dedicated to three Philadelphia premieres: Visions of the Hereafter by Christopher Theofanidis, Magan Rehna by Reena Esmail, and Reflections and Exaltations by Steven Banks himself. Between the classics and the new works, the concert runs about an hour and 55 minutes, including intermission.

It's a pairing that brings together two different kinds of musicians. The Verona Quartet carries on the lineage of their mentors—the Cleveland, Juilliard, and Pacifica Quartets—and has picked up top prizes at competitions in Wigmore Hall, Melbourne, and Osaka. They earned Chamber Music America's 2020 Cleveland Quartet Award, and The New York Times called them an "outstanding ensemble... cohesive yet full of temperament." Steven Banks, born in 1993, is both a performer and a composer who writes music he describes as addressing the human experience.

If you want more than just the music, there's a pre-concert talk by Peter Schoenbach that fills the hour before the performance. The talk starts at 6:30 PM, and the concert follows at 7:30 PM at the Perelman Theater, 300 South Broad Street.