There are many ways in which Brooklyn Rider isn’t a typical string quartet: its joyous disregard of traditional genre boundaries, its effortless cool in a centuries-old art form, its engagement with the broader world and politics. Even its calendar is extremely unusual.
“I often get the question, ‘How much do you guys rehearse a day as a quartet?’” said Johnny Gandelsman, a violinist with the group. “We’re different from how a lot of quartets operate, because we do a lot of work when we’re on the road. We don’t live in the same places anymore, and so the time that we spend together ends up being very precious.”
If you look at the performances, recordings and projects that Brooklyn Rider puts out, you would think its members were working around the clock. Most quartets keep a full-time rehearsal schedule and are, more often than not, operating out of the same city, even the same room. But Brooklyn Rider maintains its high profile mostly on the go, and apart: In between their few sessions together, they practice on their own, tend to old and new relationships with collaborators, discuss programming and, like everyone in the arts, try to gather enough support to bring their ambitious ideas to the stage.
“There’s not a day when I’m not working on some aspect of Brooklyn Rider,” said Colin Jacobsen, the quartet’s other violinist.
It’s been this way since Brooklyn Rider’s founding, 20 years ago, an anniversary the group is celebrating in the coming months. It will cover a lot of musical ground, true to the quartet’s spirit of combining an all-embracing aesthetic with the kind of vibrant, freewheeling folk style that is only possible through technical excellence.
There are noteworthy concerts, like a performance of Schubert’s String Quartet this month at Tanglewood with the superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma, a longtime collaborator. Brooklyn Rider will continue to tour Philip Glass’s complete string quartets, and in January, it will bring a thoughtful examination of democracy through music to Carnegie Hall, to observe another major anniversary: America’s 250th.
This week, Brooklyn Rider is playing all around Lincoln Center with six programs, Thursday through Saturday. The concerts are a fragmentary retrospective, including some of the quartet’s earliest and most recent projects. But they are also a broadly conceived party that will at times look like a jam session among friends.
“There’s actually very little time, as a quartet, to look backward and reflect,” Jacobsen said of the occasion, “because we’re celebrating this moment with a lot of forward motion.”
Brooklyn Rider was founded two decades ago by Gandelsman, Jacobsen, the violist Nicholas Cords and the cellist Eric Jacobsen, Colin’s brother. Like much in chamber music history, it got started almost casually, in a living room. The men were kindred spirits, not long out of school and curious about how to honor the roots of the string quartet tradition while bringing it dynamically into the 21st century. Their name is a reference to the Blue Rider movement in early modernist art, which they admired for its eclecticism; they kept “Rider” and added “Brooklyn” for a touch of chic and a nod to where they were based.
At the time, they were involved with the Silk Road Ensemble (now known as Silkroad), a group tied to Ma. Its mission to take an expansive, multicultural view of programming fed their curiosity, Cords said, with its “way of viewing the world through different musical traditions.”
Brooklyn Rider’s first recording, “Passport” (2008), immediately signaled the quartet’s approach to performance and penchant for the unexpected, with a thrillingly uninhibited account of Armenian songs by Komitas, followed by a whirlwind piece by Colin Jacobsen, who has been something like the quartet’s house composer. In its layered juxtaposition, the album set an example for the quartet’s robust discography.
Since then, Brooklyn Rider has changed little; its sensibility has remained consistent, fed by its appetite for exploration. Jacobsen said that if anything, its artistry has become more mainstream. “Genre bending is the norm, but actually, as we’ve seen in the world at large, people are more and more siloed,” he said. “So it takes specialization to cut through the noise and get people’s attention. But we don’t do that. We have stayed with this open frame.”
A perpetual challenge has been to find time to be together. Only one of the players lives in Brooklyn today, while the others live in Manhattan, the Hudson Valley and Massachusetts. And each has something else going on in his career, like teaching, solo performance, composing and, in the case of Gandelsman, running the label In a Circle Records, which produces Brooklyn Rider’s albums.
The quartet’s biggest change came a decade into its history, when Eric Jacobsen left and Michael Nicolas took his place. Nicolas fit in with what he called “a shared love of all different types of music.” But he had a lot of work to do to catch up. “Part of its repertoire from the first 10 years,” he said, “it keeps coming back.”
“All different types” isn’t an overstatement: Some of the works in Brooklyn Rider’s repertoire sound like globe-trotting folk music, while others have the exhilarating, headbanging intensity of rock. Then comes a contemporary piece of shattering beauty by Osvaldo Golijov, or a standard of similar power by Beethoven or Schubert. Different eras and styles blend into and inform one another, sometimes to revelatory effect.
Along the way, they have built a stable of collaborators, as varied as the singer Anne Sofie von Otter, the banjo player Béla Fleck and the jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman. Sometimes a player courts them; sometimes, it’s the other way around. A member of the group might bring a name to the others, which can lead to what Colin Jacobsen called “a lively discussion” about whether they’re all interested.
A similar process plays out in the quartet’s relationships with composers. Brooklyn Rider has taken up existing and new works by eminences like Golijov and Glass, but has also been a commissioning force with others, such as Gabriela Lena Frank, Du Yun, Matana Roberts and many more.
Often, new pieces come about through brainy projects. “Healing Modes,” an album that came out in March 2020, was an unexpectedly timely, poignant meditation on the healing properties of music. “The Four Elements” is a commissioning project inspired by earth, air, fire and water; it also nods to the number of artists in a quartet.
On a concert-by-concert basis, Brooklyn Rider’s programming tends to be tightly focused. But the series at Lincoln Center, Nicolas said, will be “the first time we’ve had an opportunity to show most of the aspects of who we are.”
Brooklyn Rider has organized two concerts a day, including the complete “Four Elements”; a showcase of its collaborating artists; a revival of its first collaboration, “Silent City”; a program for children; and a tribute to its origins, including a performance of the Blue Rider-affiliated Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet with the soprano Ariadne Greif.
It’s a daunting lineup, but also business as usual. “We’re not going to rest on our laurels,” Cords said. Because if Brooklyn Rider stands for anything, it’s the vitality of the string quartet, limited to four instruments yet seemingly unlimited in its expression.
“There’s an endlessness to the string quartet,” Cords said. “You could sit and play one piece for the rest of your life and not exhaust it somehow. With us, we’re continuing to evolve, and the string quartet is always there for us, like a refuge or a laboratory. It pushes back at us at times, but even in this changing world of ours, it’s still the greatest.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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