Brooklyn Rider tours Europe (April 22-May 2) and launches Kickstarter campaign

Spring sees Brooklyn Rider – hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings magazine) – embark on an eight-city European tour that showcases the game-changing string quartet’s signature blend of contemporary and classic repertoire (April 22–May 2). With programs featuring music from the group’s 2013 Mercury Classics release, A Walking Fire, the world premiere of a new commission by emerging young Swedish composer Tobias Broström, and masterpieces of the genre by Schubert and Philip Glass, Brooklyn Rider performs at clubs and concert halls in the Danish, Swedish, German, and British capitals, with four additional dates in Sweden, all crowned by the group’s Wigmore Hall debut. The tour follows the recent launch of the ensemble’s Kickstarter campaign to help fund the Brooklyn Rider Almanac, a multidisciplinary commissioning project centered around an album of the same name, with which Brooklyn Rider looks forward to celebrating its tenth anniversary this fall.
 
On tour in Europe: from Schubert to Tobias Broström
“Brooklyn Rider emerges triumphantly as the headliner,” declared the Huffington Post on the release of A Walking Fire, which Lucid Culture calls the group’s “most intense recording yet.” Selecting the disc as Q2’s “Album of the Week” and dubbing it a “white-hot walking tour from Romania to Persia,” WQXR admired the “heightened subtlety and intelligence” that Brooklyn Rider brought to A Walking Fire’s “seamless merging of musical vocabularies from disparate geographic climes.” As the station explained, A Walking Fire bookends the quartet’s “feelingly tempestuous take” on Bartók’s Second String Quartet with “two captivating contemporary works inspired by other folk music mentors”: Three Miniatures for String Quartet, an “aromatic exploration of a Persian miniature painting tradition” from Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen, and Russian composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin’s Culai, which combines the “gypsy scales, note-bending and other idiomatic material” of Romani violin with “a streetwise sensibility that feels more akin to Brooklyn than Bucharest.”
 
These three works serve as the vehicle for the quartet’s appearance at London’s Wigmore Hall (May 2), besides figuring prominently throughout the upcoming tour. In Copenhagen (April 22) and Berlin (April 28), the group also performs Zhurbin’s arrangement of a traditional Romanian piece, Doina Oltului; Schubert’s unfinished twelfth string quartet, Quartettsatz; and Philip Glass’s Second String Quartet, “Company,” as heard on Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass. On the tour’s Swedish leg, Brooklyn Rider completes its program with Tobias Broström’s First String Quartet, a dramatic work that receives its world premiere at Malmö (April 23), with subsequent renditions in Kristianstad (April 24), Vara (April 25), Stockholm (April 26), and Lund (April 27).
 
Further details of Brooklyn Rider’s upcoming engagements are provided below, and more information is available at the quartet’s web site: www.brooklynrider.com.
 
Crowd-funding new commissions and more in the Brooklyn Rider Almanac
Thanks to a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter, one of Brooklyn Rider’s most ambitious projects yet promises to soon come to fruition. Planned to comprise a studio album of new commissions, an interactive coffee table book, and more, the Brooklyn Rider Almanac takes its inspiration, like the quartet’s name, from the cross-disciplinary vision of Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), the legendary European artistic collective. As the group explains on its Kickstarter page:
 
“Visual artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and musicians like Arnold Schoenberg collaborated on a publication in 1912 that served as an artistic testament to their time and place, while offering a vision for the future. That publication was the much celebrated Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, which combined essays, art, and music.
         “Living in New York City, we are continually energized by the artistic community we are a part of: musicians, film makers, choreographers, photographers, writers, animators, fashion designers – each with a unique voice of artistic expression. The Brooklyn Rider Almanac strives to honor our namesake by creating a shared space for those voices to be heard.”
 
True to Brooklyn Rider’s vision, the new enterprise is multidisciplinary and draws on composers from beyond the classical realm. The quartet says:
 
“We’ve already commissioned 15 new works from a diverse list of musicians, all of whom operate mostly outside of the classical music world. We asked each composer to name a personally influential artistic figure active within the last 50 years, and incorporate the spirit of that influence into the piece.”
 
The new commissions include works by Australia’s Padma Newsome, whose new piece celebrates Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira; jazz icon Bill Frisell, who took novelist John Steinbeck as his muse; Glenn Kotche, drummer of the Grammy Award-winning rock band Wilco, who drew inspiration from electronic music producer Jens Massel; jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, who turned to James Brown; Venezuela’s Gonzalo Grau, whose work draws on Chick Corea and the Ensamble Gurrufio; multi-instrumentalist Dana Lyn, whose inspiration was visual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles; Greg Saunier, drummer from the rock band Deerhoof, whose stimulus is American composer and classics professor Christian Wolff; and jazz pianist Nik Bärtsch and singer-songwriter Christina Courtin, each of whose compositions pays tribute to the music of Stravinsky.
 
All 15 new commissions will be gathered together on the quartet’s forthcoming fall release, The Brooklyn Rider Almanac. To complement the new album, the group has also fostered collaborations with artists from a wide spectrum of genres to create an ambitious body of directly related work. This will include videos, animation, choreography, photo essays, articles, interviews, and remixes that will be released periodically next season on YouTube, social media, and the group’s web site, before being incorporated into an interactive coffee table book marking the consummation of the entire Almanac project. Featured artists include animation artist Becky James, choreographers Brian Brooks and John Heginbotham; dancer Lil Buck; fashion designer Bradon McDonald; photographers Erin Baiano and Ingrid Hertfelder; visual artist Kevork Mourad; and English professor Heidi Kim.
 
A video and additional information about the Brooklyn Rider Almanac and the Kickstarter campaign, which runs until May 25, are available here.
 
 
Brooklyn Rider: spring engagements
 
April 22
Copenhagen, Denmark
Mogens Dahl Koncertsal
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Ljova: Culai
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 23
Malmö, Sweden
Malmö Palladium
Musik i Syd
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Tobias Broström: String Quartet No. 1
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 24
Kristianstad, Sweden
Konserthuset Kristianstad
Musik i Syd
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Tobias Broström: String Quartet No. 1
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 25
Vara, Sweden
Vara Konserthus
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Ljova: Culai
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 26
Stockholm, Sweden
Stockholms Konserthus
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Ljova: Culai
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 27
Lund, Sweden
Magle Konserthus
Musik i Syd
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Ljova: Culai
Romanian traditional, arr. Ljova after Dinicu: Doina Oltului
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
April 28
Berlin, Germany
Watergate
 
May 2
London, UK
Wigmore Hall
Ljova: Culai
Bartók: String Quartet No. 2
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
May 8
Fernandina Beach, FL
Boys & Girls Club
Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival
Free family concert 
 
May 9
Fernandina Beach, FL
Prince of Peace Lutheran Church
Amelia Island Chamber Music Festival
Schubert: Quartettsatz
Glass: String Quartet No. 2, “Company”
Ljova: Culai
Brooklyn Rider: Seven Steps
Grau: premiere
Gilberto, arr. Jacobsen: Undiu
Colin Jacobsen: Three Miniatures for String Quartet
 
 
www.brooklynrider.com
 
facebook.com/BklynRider
 
twitter.com/Brooklyn_Rider
 
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© 21C Media Group, April 2014