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.)
