Biography:
“They are four classical musicians performing with the energy of young rock stars jamming on their guitars, a Beethoven-goes-indie foray into making classical music accessible but also celebrating why it was good in the first place.”
– Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings), Brooklyn Rider offers eclectic repertoire in gripping performances that continue to attract legions of fans and draw rave reviews from classical, world, and rock critics alike.
In fall 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera. The recording includes gems of the Ibero-American songbook as well as pieces written to texts by Octavio Paz, Rubén Darío, and Federico García Lorca. They will tour to support the album beginning in New York City. Brooklyn Rider will also debut their Healing Modes project this season which presents Beethoven’s Opus 132 alongside five new commissions by Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Matana Roberts, Caroline Shaw, and Du Yun.
Brooklyn Rider celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015 with the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary project Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured 15 specially commissioned works, each inspired by a different artistic muse. Last season, Brooklyn Rider released an album with Anne Sofie von Otter entitled So Many Things on Naïve Records, including music by Colin Jacobsen, Caroline Shaw, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Björk, Sting, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello, among others. Together they toured material from the album and more in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at Carnegie Hall and the Opernhaus Zurich.
After performances together at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the quartet toured the U.S. with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, performing Some of a Thousand Words. The intimate series of duets and solos featuring Brooks and Whelan foregrounds the live onstage music of the quartet as a dynamic and central creative component.
Other recent recording projects include Spontaneous Symbols in the fall of 2017, 2016’s The Fiction Issue with music by Gabriel Kahane, 2013’s A Walking Fire on Mercury Classics and The Impostor with Béla Fleck on Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics, plus 2011’s much-praised Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass on the composer’s Orange Mountain Music label. Violinist Johnny Gandelsman launched In A Circle Records in 2008 with the release of Brooklyn Rider’s eclectic debut recording, Passport, followed by Dominant Curve in 2010, and Seven Steps in 2012. A long-standing relationship between Brooklyn Rider and Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor resulted in the much-praised 2008 recording, Silent City.
