Jessica Thompson

Viola

Violist Jessica Thompson is a passionate chamber musician who performs regularly throughout the United States and abroad as a member of the Daedalus Quartet. Praised by the New Yorker as “a fresh and vital young participant in what is a golden age of American string quartets,” Daedalus has performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Abroad, the quartet has appeared in leading venues in Vienna, Cologne, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The quartet has won numerous awards, including Grand Prize of the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the 2007 Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center, and the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. Daedalus has been in residence at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006; among other projects, the quartet performed the complete cycle of Beethoven string quartets at Penn in 2017/18 and will be embarking on a 2-year exploration of the six Bartok string quartets beginning in fall 2023. The quartet has been recognized for its commitment to new music and has premiered works by composers such as Fred Lerdahl, Vivian Fung, Joan Tower, Richard Wernick, Anna Weesner, and Lawrence Dillon. The Daedalus Quartet has recorded discs of the music of George Perle, Fred Lerdahl, Lawrence Dillon, Haydn, and Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Ravel for Bridge Records as well as music of Joan Tower for Naxos.

In addition to her appearances with the Daedalus Quartet, Ms. Thompson has performed at numerous festivals, including Aspen, Taos, Marlboro, the Portland, Charlottesville, Newport, Skaneateles, and Halcyon Chamber Music Festivals, Bard Summerscapes, and Chamber Music Northwest. She has toured with Musicians from Marlboro and performs regularly as a member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Thompson has appeared as soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra and in recital in New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and Princeton. In 2022, she premiered a new work for viola and piano, “Jainie, a Portrait,” by Nansi Carroll. A dedicated educator, she currently teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University, and serves on the faculty of the Maine Chamber Music Seminar. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Karen Tuttle. Ms. Thompson performs on an instrument made in 1818 in Milan by Giacomo Rivolta.