Critically acclaimed as one of America’s leading ensembles, The Manhattan String Quartet is returning to Georgia, with a concert at the Plaza Arts Center in Eatonton, Georgia on Sept. 19. The quartet will perform works by Schubert and Shostakovich, and in celebration of Felix Mendelssohn’s 200th birthday, will be joined by the Kazanetti String Quartet to perform the String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20.

The Manhattan String Quartet’s recent performances have been presented in New York City at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Town Hall and the Kaye Playhouse of Hunter College; in Paris on French National Radio; at the International Shostakovich Festival in Troy, NY; and in college and university settings throughout the United States.

The group has been Quartet-in-Residence at Colgate University for the past sixteen years, and has also held similar posts at the Manhattan School of Music, Cornell University, Grinnell College, Western Connecticut State University, the Chamber Music Institute in Racine, and other prestigious institutions.

Hailed by the Boston Globe as “a national treasure,” The Manhattan String Quartet has appeared throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico and South America.

The ensemble’s benchmark transversal of the Shostakovich cycle was the only chamber music recording to make Time magazine’s “Best of 1991” classical music list.

After a series of concerts in Moscow and Leningrad in the fall of 1985, The Manhattan String Quartet became the first American classical ensemble to give a full tour of the Soviet Union under that era’s new cultural agreement.