Latest news with #BrooklynRider
Wall Street Journal
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Four Elements' by Brooklyn Rider Review: Primordial Parts, Cutting-Edge Music Making
The string quartet is often regarded as an inherently conservative institution, dating back to the early 18th century and built for elegance and balance. But composers quickly stretched its limits, with Haydn balancing his courtly works with others steeped in high drama and vivid pictorialism, and Beethoven encoding his most personal, anxiety-plagued thoughts into his late quartets. In the 20th century, new approaches to harmony dictated reconfiguring everything about the quartet, including its essentially warm, homogenous timbre. And in the mid-1980s, ensembles arose to specialize in this new approach, with groups like the Soldier and Kronos quartets also embracing music from outside the classical orthodoxy. Suddenly, quartet playing was an attractive career path for young string players with an iconoclastic streak. One of the most compelling groups to emerge in the post-Kronos era is Brooklyn Rider, an ensemble whose players were also members of The Knights, a Brooklyn-based orchestra intent on dragging the symphonic world into the 21st century, and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, where they built relationships with instrumentalists and composers from other traditions. Now the ensemble is celebrating its 20th anniversary with 'The Four Elements' (In a Circle Records), an ambitious album of works composed since 1960, available for streaming on May 23 and as a limited edition four-LP set on June 20. (Also among the quartet's anniversary events are performances of Philip Glass's complete string quartets at the Met Cloisters, May 21-23; a six-concert series at Lincoln Center, '20 Years at Play,' Aug. 7-9; and a performance with Mr. Ma at Tanglewood, Aug. 13.)
New York Times
15-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Lincoln Center Summer Festival to Bring Back Some Classical Music
Lincoln Center's summer festival will highlight the city's diverse cultural traditions, the center announced on Tuesday, including performances by an experimental collective; a celebration of Brazilian culture; and the staging of a Sanskrit epic. The collective, American Modern Opera Company, which is made up of musicians and dancers, will present a dozen productions, making its Lincoln Center debut. The festival, Summer for the City, will run June 11 through Aug. 9, and it will also include a six-performance engagement by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider to celebrate the group's 20th anniversary. Since the festival began, in 2022, it has scaled back the classical music and opera programming that used to define summer events like the Lincoln Center Festival and the Mostly Mozart Festival. This edition is a restoration of some of those types of offerings. 'This is a constantly evolving city and artist community and audience, and it's our job to be in that conversation,' Shanta Thake, Lincoln Center's chief artistic officer, said in an interview. 'You will never see a summer that looks like the summer before.' Summer for the City is part of the center's efforts to appeal to new audiences by promoting an array of genres, including classical music, comedy, pop and social dance. Last year, the festival attracted 442,000 people, up from 380,000 in 2023, the center said. In June, members of the American Modern Opera Company will perform the New York premiere of 'The Comet/Poppea,' which pairs George Lewis's adaptation of W.E.B. Du Bois's story 'The Comet' and Monteverdi's 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea.' Additional programming by the collective includes a staging of Messiaen's song cycle 'Harawi,' sung by the soprano Julia Bullock, and the staged premiere of Matthew Aucoin's 'Music for New Bodies,' directed by Peter Sellars. The lineup also features 'Rome Is Falling,' written by the bass player Doug Balliett, and described as a 'zany lesson on the absurdity of what can happen when influential people lose power.' Lincoln Center said it hoped this year's festival would help shine a light on the city's vibrant cultural communities. The lineup includes 'Mahabharata,' a large-scale retelling of a Sanskrit epic by Why Not Theater, a Canadian group, and a weeklong celebration of Brazilian culture featuring the singer-songwriter Lenine and the rock band Os Mutantes. The Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, under the baton of its music and artistic director Jonathon Heyward, will perform a mix of new and old. Each of its programs will feature at least one living composer. But the ensemble will also perform Robert Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Clara Schumann's Konzertsatz in F minor, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and other classic works. The giant disco ball that has become a staple of the festival will once again hang over a dance floor built on Lincoln Center's main plaza. Clint Ramos, the Broadway costume and set designer, will return to decorate the center's outdoor spaces, this year based on the theme of birds.
