Tashi, stylized as TASHI and later known as the Tashi Quartet, was a legendary 1970s group that championed contemporary music, making recordings that are still in print and routinely recommended. Although the quartet soon disbanded, it has re-formed occasionally and garnered substantial attention for new performances and recordings. Tashi was founded in 1973 by violinist Ida Kavafian, pianist Peter Serkin, cellist Fred Sherry, and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. The players were all young at the time, and all went on to significant solo careers. The ensemble's goal was to perform the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) of Olivier Messiaen, a difficult work written (for the unusual clarinet-and-strings configuration) while Messiaen was a German prisoner of war during World War II and first performed in a prison camp. Even by the early 1970s, the work was not often performed, and performances by Tashi helped it find a durable place in the chamber repertory. Tashi recorded the Quatour pour le fin du temps in 1976 for the RCA label; the album has remained in print and was recommended by New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross in his influential survey of 20th century music, The Rest is Noise. Tashi commissioned and performed various contemporary works, including Toru Takemitsu's Quatrain II, which the group premiered in 1977. The group made several other recordings for RCA, including works by Mozart and Beethoven, as well as contemporary music. Tashi disbanded in 1978. It has sometimes been stated that the ensemble was inactive for the next 30 years, before reuniting in 2008 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Messiaen's birth. However, they issued the album Rendezvous with Tashi on RCA in 1992, performed in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in the early 1990s, and recorded music of Charles Wuorinen for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1996; those recordings were reissued by the Naxos label in 2006. ~ James Manheim