Madeira native's quartet wins chamber music competition

Madeira native Joseph Maile, 29, is a co-founder of the Telegraph Quartet, which recently won the Grand Prize at the 2014 Fischoff Chamber Music Competition, the largest chamber music competition in the world.

The contest, which has helped to launch the careers of some of the world's finest musicians, was held in May in South Bend, Ind.

Previous winners include eighth blackbird, violinist Joshua Bell and the Ariel Quartet, now quartet-in-residence at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

"The good thing is that it gives you exposure. As a quartet, we are about a year old. It's a challenge because there are so many string quartets out there and we are still trying to get ourselves on the radar," says Maile, a violinist.

The quartet was in Cincinnati this week following performances at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival in Michigan, a festival founded by CCM piano professor James Tocco.

Maile began studying violin at age 5 at CCM. His local teachers included Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra violinists Constantine Kiradjieff and Gabe Pegis. He is a former concertmaster of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra, and performed as soloist as a winner of the orchestra's concerto competition.

After earning a degree at the Juilliard School, where his teacher was Itzhak Perlman, he studied at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and at the San Francisco Conservatory.

Maile lives in San Francisco where he helped organize the Telegraph Quartet (named after Telegraph Hill) with his wife, Pei Ling Lin, violist of the quartet, Jeremiah Shaw, cellist, and Eric Chin, violin.

The group won $11,000 in cash prizes, including the gold medal in the string division as well as the grand prize, a Midwestern tour (Oct. 4-12) and a 10-day tour to Italy in summer of 2015, to perform in the Emilia Romagna Festival.