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Although Bravo! Vail grew from a small chamber music series in the late 1980s to a full summer festival of international orchestras, chamber music remains at the heart of its programming. This year, the festival welcomes its inaugural month-long resident chamber ensemble, the Ivalas Quartet, making its Bravo! Vail debut from July 1-27 with more than 16 free performances throughout the valley. Besides formal concerts, the group will lead several Little Listeners community events for children at local libraries and perform with Bravo! Vail’s 2025 piano fellows and other musicians.

The Ivalas’s mission is to celebrate historically underrepresented voices, usually past and present composers who are people of color, like the members of the quartet, who program their music with well-known selections from the repertory. A loose unifying theme connects them.

That mission inspired violist Marcus Stevenson to join the New York-based group in late 2023, when he was a graduate student at the Juilliard School and the viola seat became available. The group was halfway through its graduate residency at Juilliard at the time, studying with the prestigious Juilliard String Quartet. Stevenson joined violinist Reuben Kebede and cellist Pedro Sánchez, founding members of Ivalas, at the University of Michigan, where the group was formed in 2017. Second violinist Tiani Butts became a member when the Ivalas was in residence at the University of Colorado-Boulder under the mentorship of the Takács Quartet.

“The opportunity to perform at Bravo! Vail is really a wonderful experience,” Stevenson said. “Having more performers of color on stage is also important. We want to continue to expand and create a musical community that is welcoming of different people.”

The residency gets underway this Tuesday, July 1, at Vail Interfaith Chapel, where the group will perform Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A minor and the String Quartet No. 3, “Somehow We Can,” by the veteran but still unsung composer Alvin Singleton, who lives in Brooklyn, not far from the Ivalas’s Manhattan homebase. In May 2024 the group performed both works at Carnegie Hall, with Singleton in attendance. “It means a lot to bring to life someone’s vision, especially because a lot of times audiences are hearing the work for the first time, so we want to make a good impression and share what the composer intended, while still being ourselves,” Stevenson said.

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On July 8, also at the Vail Interfaith Chapel, the Ivalas will perform Dvořák and Bartók and the 2023 piece “Deliverance” by Los Angeles-based composer Derrick Skye. The single-movement, 18-minute work blends Persian classical melodies with rhythmic elements from Western and North African music. It was commissioned by Ivalas in 2024.

“What really drew us to (Skye’s) work is the transcultural identity and experience that he always brings,” Stevenson said. “Intercultural collaboration is a really beautiful thing and something that can push society forward. We celebrate all those qualities in ‘Deliverance,’ which is unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. And for a lot of audiences, it’s the first time they’ve experienced these different worlds coming together. So, it’s always a fun one to share.”

The following day’s program, at Brush Creek Pavilion, also offers contemporary music, including two of the most celebrated Black composers of our time: Carlos Simon and Jessie Montgomery, whose 2006 piece “Strum” has entered the repertoire. Composer Eleanor Alberga, from Kingston, Jamaica, will be new to many. “Like some of the others, she loves to bring forth her heritage and her background as a Jamaican-British composer,” Stevenson said. The piece on the program is her String Quartet No. 2, with which “she takes really small ideas and develops them into something much bigger. And it always feels so unique to her.”

A special program at the historic Tabor Opera House, in Leadville, concludes the residency on July 25 and 27. The Ivalas will be joined by Benjamin Adler, the associate principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, in residence at the festival July 16-23. Together they will perform Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, a classic for this configuration, and the lesser-known Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a turn-of-the-century British composer whose music is going through a resurgence.

The Little Listeners @ the Library events are also important because they fit another important aspect of the Ivalas’s mission — reaching out to younger audiences. “Especially for young musicians, to see someone who looks like them on stage can be very meaningful,” Stevenson said. “Many times we’ve performed for young students and they’ve come up to us afterward to say they want to be like us. It’s always really touching and gives us hope for a future for classical music that’s bright and exciting.”

To find out all dates and programs of the Ivalas Quartet’s residency at Bravo! Vail this year, visit .