Denali Quartet members Sarah Thornblade, Joel Pargman, Alma Fernandez, and Timothy Loo were featured year-round as artists-in-residence of Santa Monica’s Jacaranda concert series, hailed by the late Alan Rich of the LA Weekly as “the right music in the right place at the right time,” from its inaugural 2003 season until 2010.

        Cellist Timothy Loo founded the quartet in 1999 while a graduate student at the University of Southern California. Pivotal in the quartet’s development was the guidance of Peter Marsh, former first violinist of the Lenox Quartet, and cellist Ronald Leonard.  In 2000, the quartet performed at the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival.  A voyage that summer to majestic Mt. McKinley, known to Inuit tribes as “Denali” (The High One), gave the fledgling quartet its name.

        Violinists Sarah Thornblade and Joel Pargman joined Denali in 2002.  Soon thereafter Professor Byron Adams, Dean of UC Riverside’s School of Music, selected the Denali Quartet to give a concert of Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s quartet cycle as the central event of UC Riverside’s Life and Music of Silvestre Revueltas Symposium, for which the quartet received a UC MEXUS grant.  The arrival this year of violinist Tereza Stanislav, formerly of the Enso Quartet, replacing Sarah Thornblade as 1st violin, brings the quartet to its current configuration. 

Opening the 2004-05 season was a critically acclaimed program celebrating pioneering American composers.  Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times praised Sarah Thornblade’s “rapturously winning approach” to Terry Riley’s Cantos Desiertos, and also her collaboration with “commanding young cellist” Timothy Loo in a “fervent performance” of Ives’ Piano Trio.  Mr. Swed also highlighted “violinist to remember” Joel Pargman’s performance “with firm authority” of Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra. 

This concert season Denali will perform eight concerts in the Greater Los Angeles area, including works by Mozart, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Ginastera, Janacek, Ben Johnston, Arnold Schoenberg, Tigran Mansurian, Johann Strauss, and more.