Mixing it up

BROOKLYN RIDER’S WIDE-RANGING REPERTOIRE

Brooklyn Rider’s wide-ranging repertoire

The string quartet known as Brooklyn Rider is so admired for championing contemporary music that its program on Friday, Feb. 9, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center looks surprising; it starts with Mozart and ends with Ravel. Less standard repertoire comes in between — an arrangement of a song by Brazilian bossa nova pioneer João Gilberto and a new work, titled Qi, that the group commissioned from composer Evan Ziporyn — but framing them with two of the most canonical quartets in the repertoire seems like an emphatic statement.

The group is indeed making a point: There is no conflict involved in being devoted to both new music and established classics. In a recent phone conversation with Pasatiempo, violinist Colin Jacobsen, a founding member of the ensemble (and arranger of the Gilberto song on the program), pointed out that Brooklyn Rider has a history of mixing things up that way. “On our recordings,” he said, “we often base our selections around a big piece from the string-quartet canon — Beethoven’s Op. 131, the Debussy Quartet, Bartók’s Quartet No. 2 — and then put strange bedfellows next to those works.” There’s nothing unusual about quartets dropping a contemporary piece into a recital of classics, but Brooklyn Rider thinks through that process deeply. “In this program, Ziporyn’s Qi and the Gilberto piece will pick up on things Ravel was working with — his harmonic language, details of his textural writing. People do think of us as a new-music quartet or as a group that collaborates with musicians who work outside the classical canon. But actually, what brought us together was that we enjoyed playing the standard repertoire more with each other than we did in other situations, and when we played together, we felt that there was new life within that music.”

The foursome traces its ancestry to the first years of the current century, when its members starting overlapping in other groups, most notably in the Silk Road Ensemble, a collective of musicians representing diverse musical traditions from around the world. Jacobsen explained: “Johnny Gandelsman [the other violinist] and Nick Cords [the violist] went to Curtis together, I went to Juilliard, and we kept intersecting. My brother, Eric, was the original cellist, but in 2016 he was replaced by Michael Nicolas because Eric wanted to spend more time working as a conductor. There was a rather long lead-up to our becoming established as Brooklyn Rider, but through all the ensemble playing we happened to be doing together we found that we had a chemistry. A chamber ensemble like this has got to feel that strong connection. If you don’t feel from the beginning that you are 90 percent of the way toward a vision of what a quartet should sound like, then I think it’s a pretty difficult thing to embark on.”

By about 2005, the four founding players formally coalesced into a group. They selected the name Brooklyn Rider as a hybrid moniker that alluded on one hand to the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) — the avant-garde artistic movement of nearly a century earlier — and on the other to the very hip New York City borough where the musicians were based. The quartet now performs about 50 concerts each year, and the members continue their outside affiliations, principally with Silk Road Ensemble and with The Knights (an innovative Brooklyn-based chamber orchestra conducted by Eric Jacobsen). Violist Nicolas is also a member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). “Fitting it all together is like a difficult jigsaw puzzle,” Jacobsen observed, “but it makes for a full and fulfilling musical life, moving among groups in different configurations. We block out time to focus as a quartet, but we love the fact that we can all go away and do other projects. I love being able to work in different scales that way, and then come back to the string quartet, which is such an intimate medium.”

The players’ involvement with Silk Road Ensemble brings them into close contact with musicians outside the Western classical tradition. Their recordings, for example, include collaborations with the banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck and the Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor. “Sometimes,” Jacobsen said, “these experiences affect our approach to quartet playing in tangible, technical ways. It can inspire us to look for specific colors we might not otherwise have thought about. For example, in Santa Fe we’re playing the Ravel String Quartet, and we may remember a certain sound Kayhan Kalhor made on his Persian spike-fiddle and decide that is a color to consider for a particular passage in Ravel. In Silk Road Ensemble, we often work with musicians who come out of an oral tradition rather than one that is text-based. That can lead to a real internalization of the music, wanting to translate music that you’re reading into something that is very organic and internal and that is singing through every pore in your body. In our Western-style training we are taught how so much of a performance can come from details that can only be suggested by the written score — timing, tone color, balance — but for people who have learned music by ear, that becomes all the more natural.”

The foursome’s program spans more than two centuries, from Mozart’s G-major Quartet (K.387, written in 1782) to Ravel’s Quartet (1902-1903), to Gilberto’s “Undiú” (1973), to Ziporyn’s Qi (2013). The newest piece on the program, Qi is also the centerpiece of Brooklyn Rider’s latest CD, Spontaneous

Symbols, which was released by In a Circle Records this past November. Ziporyn, a performer on clarinet and bass clarinet as well as a composer, serves on the faculty of M.I.T., was a co-founder of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and was a member of Steve Reich and Musicians. His compositions generally fall into the category of post-minimalism or draw on crosscultural inspiration, particularly from Indonesian music. He writes: “The string quartet always makes me think in elemental terms — perhaps the combination of repertoire (Bartók and Beethoven, tough acts to follow), the instruments themselves, and the intense intimacy with which groups like Brooklyn Rider work together.” Here his musical thoughts grew out of the idea of qi, which he describes as “the traditional Chinese character for life-force, a concept as ubiquitous and difficult to precisely define as analogous principles in all cultures and religions.” “Evan’s piece,” Jacobsen said, “is about energy and how it moves in music and how it relates to the world. The piece has a movement about lucid dreaming, then one that involves the ideal of Zen meditation, and a final movement, ‘Transport,’ which is about how that energy goes out into the world.”