• Courtesy Of Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival
• FaMa Quartet, from left: Ella Eom, Jasper Sewell, Julie Kim and Ari Peraza-Webb

Every summer, the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival gathers talented young violinists, violists and cellists from around the country on the Saint Michael's College campus in Colchester for four intense weeks of instruction, training and performance. The students, who range from 13 to 30 years old, practice their instruments for hours every day and rehearse with fellow students in quartets to which they were assigned before arriving. They unwind in part by attending professional quartet performances by festival faculty and visiting artists.

Out of that crucible recently emerged a student quartet that won the preeminent U.S. prize for young chamber musicians: the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Its members met at the festival in 2021 and named themselves the FaMa Quartet after an abbreviation for the key of F Major. Violinists Ella Eom and Julie Kim, both from New Jersey, and cellist Ari Peraza-Webb, from Ohio, were 16 at the time; violist Jasper Sewell, from Tennessee, was 17. Two years later, the foursome won the 2023 Fischoff junior division gold medal.

FaMa will reunite for a public performance this Saturday, May 18, at Isham Family Farm in Williston in honor of the festival's upcoming 20th season, which runs from June 23 to July 21. In the spirit of the festival's emphasis on community involvement, the free concert is a benefit for the Williston Community Food Shelf. Audiences are asked to bring monetary or food donations.

This may be FaMa's last reunion for a while. Speaking by phone from his Chattanooga home, violist Sewell said all four members will head into even more intense training in the fall. Eom and Kim will attend the dual-degree program at Columbia University and the Juilliard School in New York City. Peraza-Webb will go to Juilliard, and Sewell will study at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University in Texas. Only Sewell will attend the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival this summer.

How does one end up as part of a prizewinning quartet? Nineteen-year-old high school senior Sewell said his mother started him on the violin at age 4.

"Mom wasn't a musician, but she listened to a lot of Bach," he said. "She noticed I'd laugh at some parts and had perfect pitch." Thanks to his mom, he noted, all six of his younger brothers also play an instrument — and, like him, swim competitively.

After years of violin lessons, Sewell took up viola at age 13 at the Jacobs School of Music Summer String Academy in Indiana, in part because he could read the alto clef. During his first summer at the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival, in 2019, he studied violin. When he returned to Colchester in 2021, he recalled, "I opted to play violin in one chamber group, viola in another." The latter became FaMa.

Liz Chang, the festival's current artistic director, said she matches incoming students in quartets based on their ages, ranges of experience, teachers' comments and audition videos. Each quartet is notified a few weeks before the start of the festival. Its members must get in touch, decide on a piece to play and learn their parts before the festival begins.

This year, Chang is sorting the festival's largest incoming class ever — roughly 220 students — into 55-odd quartets, a task she described as currently "looming over me." Her predecessor, festival founder Kevin Lawrence, matched the members of FaMa and stepped down the year they formed; he continues to teach as part of the faculty.

Sewell said the quartet didn't click right away. Its members had chosen Felix Mendelssohn's String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor.

"The first rehearsal, we all went into Ari's dorm room. It was a very awkward dynamic. We ran the piece once, and no one said anything," Sewell recalled.

It was their quartet coach, Bayla Keyes, a founding member of the Muir String Quartet, who "really broke that bubble. She encouraged us to put our own interpretation on it," he said. Their eventual connection was "all about the music at a level that I hadn't experienced before," Sewell continued. "Our friendships really stemmed from the music first."

Keyes asked the group to memorize the Mendelssohn in two weeks so that it could be performed in the festival's third week.

"They had no idea that was impossible," Chang said with a chuckle, adding that FaMa nevertheless succeeded. "There's something to be said for [being young and] just not knowing what you're doing."

Sewell said the quartet has since memorized everything it has played. That includes a movement of Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, which helped FaMa win second place at the 2022 Coltman Chamber Music Competition, a prize of the Austin Chamber Music Center in Texas; and Claude Debussy's String Quartet in G Minor, part of its winning Fischoff program. Saturday's concert will feature the Debussy, the Mendelssohn's first movement and a movement of Eugène Ysaÿe's Sonata for Two Violins.

Sewell, who has also attended the similarly high-level Meadowmount School of Music in Westport, N.Y., said the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival's rigor is "balanced" with hiking, amusement park trips and "community involvement on a large scale."

Students participate in two weekend Quartet Hops, in which quartets perform free pop-up concerts at various shops and cafés in downtown Burlington and the South End. The May 18 concert and the festival's final concert, by the more advanced fellows in the program, are collaborations with Music for Food, an initiative started by Boston-based violinist Kim Kashkashian to raise awareness of local hunger.

"This is a big part of our identity: providing students a place to grow, be an ambassador for music, give back to the community in a more tangible way," Chang said. "They're advocating for the thing they believe in."

The students' enthusiasm for the music they play will be evident to anyone who attends the festival's public concerts and events — which tend to be packed and raucous affairs with more stamping and whooping than polite applause. (It helps to know exactly how hard it is to play the music.) This year's lineup includes a tutorial with renowned violinist Hilary Hahn, who will appear via Zoom from Brazil, and concerts by the visiting Balourdet, Verona and Miró quartets.

The Balourdet Quartet, Chang mentioned, won the Fischoff senior division gold medal in 2020; one of its members is a three-time Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival student. It's not hard to imagine that the FaMa Quartet will be back one day, too.