Push back the onset of post-holiday funk: The wildly inventive string quartet Brooklyn Rider makes its long-overdue Cincinnati debut with two appearances on Jan. 8 and 9, sponsored by Chamber Music Cincinnati. Brooklyn Rider has been at the forefront of pushing artistic boundaries since its founding in 2004, having collaborated with master musicians in every genre from Yo-Yo Ma to Joshua Redman and Béla Fleck to Martin Hayes and Anne Sofie von Otter. (Their album Dreamers with Mexican Jazz singer Magos Herrera was named one of NPR’s best Classical albums of 2018.)
Those collaborations are a natural extension of how the group’s co-founders — violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen and his brother, cellist and conductor Eric — experienced music growing up. Their parents were professional musicians and frequently hosted chamber music gatherings that took on an atmosphere of jam sessions.
The brothers both attended Juilliard and founded The Knights in 2000, an orchestral collaborative that embraces contemporary culture and honors classical tradition. (The brothers are artistic advisors and Eric serves as conductor.)
Four years later, Brooklyn Rider was launched.
“The relationships we had with the other two members — violinist Johnny Gandelsman and violist Nicholas Cords — went back a number of years before we committed to the idea of Brooklyn Rider,” Colin says. “Doing any sort of quartet is a huge commitment. In addition to a sense of aesthetics, knowing where you want to be going is 90 percent and the last 10 percent is the most difficult: program planning and rehearsals.”
Michael Nicolas replaced Eric in the quartet in 2015 after he left to pursue a conducting career.
Brooklyn Rider’s first appearance in Cincinnati will be “Notes From a Library” at The Mercantile Library on Tuesday, Jan. 8.
“It will be a fun program,” Colin says. “There’ll be some of Brooklyn Rider’s earlier works, including one of my compositions, and pieces with some of the Balkan, Persian and Middle Eastern influences that we love to perform.”
There will also be a reception and opportunities for conversation and discussion.
The following evening, Brooklyn Rider moves to Memorial Hall with a program focusing on healing, inspired by Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Opus 132, a bedrock of the string quartet repertoire, which will be performed in the second half.
The quartet’s third movement carries a dedication from Beethoven: “A holy song of thanksgiving from a convalescent to the Deity, in the Lydian mode (a seven-tone musical scale).” Beethoven wrote the work after recovering from a near-fatal illness.
“It celebrates the return of his creative spirit,” Colin says. “Taking that as a jumping-off point, we asked five composers to respond to the idea of healing in music and it’s been wonderful to see their responses.”
The composers are Matana Roberts, Reena Esmail, Gabriela Lena Frank, Caroline Shaw and Du Yun. Shaw and Yun are Pulitzer Prize winners, but that wasn’t a factor, nor was featuring all female composers.
“When we started putting names on the table, they were people we wanted to reach out to for the first time as well as others we wanted to continue working with,” Colin says.
Coming from varying cultural backgrounds, each composer touched on a different topic. For some, he notes, it was a personal illness. Others, like Roberts, took “an overtly political direction.” She used our nation’s border crisis as a representation that society needs to heal.
Brooklyn Rider will perform the world premiere of Yun’s untitled work. “Her piece will relate to mental illness in China, a subject that’s taboo there,” Colin says. “She told us there isn’t even a word for it in Chinese.”
The Beethoven quartets, especially Opus 132, continue to resonate with musicians and audiences as much for the powerful emotions conveyed as the music itself.
“It transcends its time and place,” Colin says. “Opus 132 taps into a long history of music. Every time you play it, you have a window into what it means to be a human being on this planet. In a very divisive political climate, in a difficult world, there’s a need to come together and music is one of the avenues that one can look to for healing throughout the centuries.”
Brooklyn Rider performs 7 p.m. Jan. 8 at The Mercantile Library and 7:30 p.m. Jan. 9 at Memorial Hall. Tickets and more info: cincychamber.org
This article appears in Jan 2-8, 2019.
