Critical Acclaim
Dominant Curve | Passport | Silent City
Ensemble & Concert Reviews
Press for Dominant Curve
“Listening to Brooklyn Rider's ten-minute electro-acoustic rendition of John Cage's In a Landscape, written in 1948 for solo piano or harp, is personally more gratifying than watching the man perform on old Youtube clips. Sure, those are essential landmarks, but there is something fuller and rounder about Rider's performance, perhaps equally eerie. Nothing wrong with that last word on the quartet's third release, Dominant Curve (In A Circle). Their interpretation of Claude Debussy's String Quartet in G minor takes care of that, only here it is eerily beautiful. Who are we kidding? That sums up the entire record, which also includes originals by Uzbeki composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky and Kojiro Umezaki, the last scored for the Japanese bamboo flute, shakuhachi, which I have not had the chance to hear—it's only available digitally, and I was sent a physical copy. No less, there is plenty for me to dive into. I became an instant fan of these four men from my neighborhood after they created a masterful album with my favorite musician, Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor, Silent City, in 2008. The three-violin and cello combination of Johnny Gandelsman, Colin Jacobsen, Nicholas Cords, and Eric Jacobsen are well-primed musicians, having played with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble and collaborated with an impressive breadth of artists, including Irish fiddler Martin Hayes and Oakland- and NYC-based art-pop band 2 Foot Yard. Dominant Curve equals the quartet's previous work in intensity and sheer beauty, but when I really need the fix, I keep it simple with the first four movements of Colin Jacobsen's homage to Debussy, Achille's Heel. Achilles was Debussy's first name: Achilles-Claude. Though the composer died of rectal cancer and not a leg wound, Jacobsen attempts and succeeds at painting a prettier picture with his tribute.”
—Huffington Post
“Superb”
—Chicago Reader
“One of the most inventive and thrilling albums of the year”
—TimeOut Chicago
“The three new pieces on this album from the New York-based string quartet Brooklyn Rider do an intriguing dance around the two older ones (Claude Debussy’s Quartet in G minor and an arrangement of John Cage’s In a Landscape). Achille’s Heel, by violinist Colin Jacobsen, engages in a direct four-movement dialogue with Debussy that pays him the compliment of almost never mimicking him. Kojiro Umezaki’s (Cycles) what falls must rise is full of auditory depictions of birds and breezes (assisted by shakuhachi and electronics) and a clarity of attitude that Debussy would have understood. Some post-Debussyan touches emerge also in Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s ...al niente. The Cage arrangement is beautifully cosmic and simple, and there are lovely episodes in the quartet’s performance of Debussy, though the opening movement feels stiff.”
—The Mail and Globe
“The adventurous, hip string quartet has used the G-minor String Quartet Claude Debussy wrote in 1893 as the hub of their new disc. The spokes are 3 new creations—Achille's Heel, by Colin Jacobsen, (Cycles) what falls must rise, by Kojiro Umezaki, and ...al niente, by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovski—and a quartet-plus-electronics arrangement of a modern classic, John Cage's In a Landscape, originally written for harp or piano in 1948. Over the past half-dozen years the quartet has shown incredible energy in promoting new works—an energy that buzzes off this disc. The recorded sound is close and dry, but the precision and control in the playing is stunning. All of the newer pieces are about achieving certain effects—the most successful (and challenging) are Umezaki's atmospheres, which morph into a complex, arresting dance eight minutes in.”
—Toronto Star
“The NYC based string quartet Brooklyn Rider covers a lot of ground with their newest release from In A Circle Records, Dominant Curve. From Debussy to arrangements of John Cage and featuring compositions by the musicians themselves, Brooklyn Rider shows deep artistic maturity and a spiritual essence bordering on the psychedelic. // This disc, centered around Debussy's monumental String Quartet No. 1, featured music by, inspired by, or in the spirit of Debussy. Achille's Heel, by violinist Colin Jacobsen, opened with a spare threnody that hinted little at the chaos to follow in the second movement. Every trick in the book was pulled out: harmonics, glissandi, multiple stops and col legno combined to produce an intense sonic mind-warp, varied and somehow hypnotic despite the dynamic extremes. The third movement, Loveland, was simple and beautiful, featuring sighing violins and pizzicato cello playing in closely-layered modalities that occasionally intersected to create lush cadences. Finishing with a dragonfly's flight of fancy on a ceaseless moto perpetuo, the music heaved and seethed in impossible quadrangles and dying suns. // The extremely atmospheric (Cycles) what falls must rise by Kojiro Umezaki (who also played shakuhachi and electronics) was an eerie soundscape of very different character. Redolent with Japanese imagery and mystery, it moved ceaselessly, sound colors shifting in and out like a ghost coming in from a cold gray electronic fog. The piece closed with a perplexing coda, a more conventional string quartet playing with the shakuhachi. It seemed awkwardly appended to the end of an otherwise marvelous piece. Thematically it was enjoyable but did not seem to fit in the slightest with the rest of the material; it served to unnecessarily break the spell. // They approached the Debussy with a vigorous attack that seemed at times like almost too much, but Debussy always sounds right to me when played at the very edge of the emotions; his music inhabits a world of dreams and half-light, of terror and overpowering surges of innate divinity. Brooklyn Rider made the most of this titanic work, throwing caution to the wind with bold tempos and unabashedly dramatic dynamics. Yet there was something old-fashioned there too; the whole thing had a sepia-tone timbre to it, like listening to a recording from the thirties. The third movement ended with a gentle, rapturous ascent, rendered as prayerfully as anything by Messaien. // It closed with two more contemplative, dreamy works in keeping with the overall feel of the release: ...al niente by Dmitiri Yanov Yanovsky and an arrangement of John Cage's In a Landscape. Exciting and fresh, Dominant Curve is full of worthwhile new material as well as a valid and imaginative interpretation of the Debussy string quartet.”
—Northwest Reverb
“f Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble was a TV series, then Brooklyn Rider would be the spinoff—the Frasier to Silk Road's Cheers. Having played in the famed cellist's globetrotting world music ensemble, the members of this oddly named string quartet could hardly be expected to confine themselves to playing Haydn and Mozart and Debussy. Their first two albums featured original works, including pieces by the quartet's members and a whole disc done in collaboration with their Silk Road partner Kayhan Kalhor, the master of the Persian fiddle. Now, Brooklyn Rider returns with an even more ambitious and far-ranging disc, built around... Debussy. // There has been a tendency to treat Debussy's one and only string quartet with a hazy Impressionism, but Brooklyn Rider's straightforward, no-nonsense reading—which might sound dry and brittle in another context—neatly ties Debussy's century-old piece to the contemporary cross-cultural works that precede it. Given the influence of Indonesian gamelan music on Debussy's quartet, what seems unlikely on paper turns out to be surprisingly appropriate in actuality. // Violinist Colin Jacobsen opens the disc with Achille's Heel (get it? Claude-Achille Debussy?), a piece with echoes of traditional Asian and popular Western music. Kojiro Umezaki's piece, (Cycles) What Falls Must Rise, has a more tenuous relationship to the Debussy, but its combination of Japanese shakuhachi flute, percussion, and string quartet is a happy one, and the piece is an album highlight. So too is their version of John Cage's haunting and simple In A Landscape, originally for solo piano or solo harp but here given a 21st-century, ambient electronic arrangement.”
—EMusic
“It makes sense that pioneering string quartet Brooklyn Rider would feel close to Debussy, considering their background as classical players who, these days anyway, specialize in world music. The perennially cutting-edge Brooklyn group appear on the latest Silk Road Ensemble album; their first cd included strikingly original arrangements of Armenian folk songs plus a tango by Russian-born violist/composer Ljova. With credits and credentials like that, they hardly need a career boost, but this hypnotically beautiful, stunningly imaginative cross-pollinating work is exactly that. The album’s central theme could be summed up somewhat reductionistically as circularity: this is a collection of new commissioned pieces based on elements that return and echo with a deliberately hypnotic effect, tonally, rhythmically and volume-wise. The concept goes back as far as humanity does, expanding over the centuries and when Debussy discovered Javanese gamelan music, that was the quantum leap, in terms of western classical music at least. The genius of this album is simply picking up where Debussy left off. // Smartly, Brooklyn Rider make Debussy’s lone string quartet the centerpiece here rather than the opening or concluding track, setting it in context with the new works around it. It’s amazing how new and fresh it sounds, delivered with particular percussive verve, nudging the listener to tune in to ideas resonating elsewhere here—unison passages, echoes of Russian and Asian tonalities in the first movement, the swirling repetition of the second and gamelanesque allusions in the last one. There are also motifs that have insinuated themselves into rock music over the years: listen closely and you’ll find them! // Ensemble member and violinist Colin Jacobsen’s Achille’s Heel (Debussy’s birth name was Achille-Claude) displays a strong Kayhan Kalhor influence, and no wonder, considering how closely the group has worked with the Iranian compose (their 2008 collaboration Silent City is a high water mark in East/West mashups). The theme insinuates itself quietly, growing more intense with a Kalhoresque insistence alternated with pizzicato passages leading to an absolutely haunting figure where one of the violins pedals a funereal, bell-like tone before the striking contrast of the most rock-oriented passage on the entire album. Jacobsen’s cantabile astringency in the third movement casually sets the stage for the fiery riffage of the final, counterintuitively ending much as it began. // Shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki solos with the group on his composition, (Cycles) What Falls Must Rise, fading up with what sounds like actual studio feedback, the big flute alternating between stillness and rapidfire fifth intervals. A call to alarm sounds distantly over ambient strings and a low, crackling tone that could be a short circuit (amazing how sometimes snafus in the studio translate into the best moments a group could hope for!). It ends with a good ambient jape whose ending deseves not to be spoiled here. The first of the two other tracks here is a tone poem, extended, apprehensive stillness punctuated by ambient effects, by another one of the group’s Silk Road cohorts, Uzbek composer Dmitry Yanov-Yanovsky. The other makes a fullscale rondo out of the John Cage composition In a Landscape, Justin Messina’s artful electronic loops sealing the deal as what’s essentially a blues lick runs over and over again, its permutations finally fading out gracefully.”
—Lucid Culture
“Despite the hip name and the intricate, rather Yellow Submarine-like design, this release by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider is less closely tied to popular traditions than any number of other releases by the many contemporary groups that have followed the model of the Kronos Quartet. The influences here come instead from musical traditions around the world. Several of the works are connected with the centerpiece, Claude Debussy's String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10; the opening Achille's Heel refers to Debussy's middle name, while Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky's ...al niente quotes the quartet itself, which in turn shows numerous effects of Debussy's encounter with the music of Java and Bali. John Cage's In a Landscape, composed in 1948 and altogether one of his less radical pieces, is oriented toward Asian traditions more generally, and an added electronic track by Justin Messina brings another cyclical dimension to a program with a lot of them. Shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki's (Cycles) what falls must rise neatly incorporates traditional Japanese melody into the wider concept. Best of all, Brooklyn Rider's performance of the Debussy itself achieves the goal of defamiliarizing the work, without which the entire project would founder. They deliver a brisk, punchy reading that sets up the music's rhythmic experiments in an unusual way. All the music is more or less tonal, and each work treats the instruments of the string quartet in a different way without fundamentally departing from the conventions of the ensemble.”
—All Music Guide
“The string quartet Brooklyn Rider is still relatively new—they released their first recording on their own in 2008 after working with Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble—but they are making a name for themselves. For this kind of group, an easy way with both old and new, composed and improvised, is essential, and Brooklyn Rider has it. On Dominant Curve, they've chosen to unify the album thematically more than musically, and they focus on exploring how the ideas of French composer Claude Debussy, who lived from 1862 to 1918, have traveled forward through music to the modern day. To that end, they've chosen to perform Debussy's own String Quartet in G Minor, and Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen has composed his own four-movement quartet titled Achilles' Heel (Debussy's given name was Achille-Claude), which effectively explores similar rhythmic and harmonic concepts to the Debussy piece. The quartet also commissioned original compositions from Japan's Kojiro Umezaki, Uzbekistan's Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, and American Justin Messina that explore some of those same ideas in very different ways. // The reading of the old Debussy piece, originally written in 1893, is intense and lively, full of sharp dynamic shifts and subtly virtuoso playing that imparts amazing tonal and textural variety to the score. The third movement in particular is gorgeously ethereal. This piece is a natural choice for the group. When Debussy composed it, he was just embarking on his most celebrated phase, in which he became keenly interested in modal harmony, unusual scales and sound combinations, and ethnic music from outside Europe, including Indonesian gamelan, which informed some of his rhythmic ideas. Brooklyn Rider have built their repertoire on a restless interest in synthesizing global sounds and Western classical music. Jacobsen's piece, written to act as something of a descendant of String Quartet in G Minor, also uses modal composition and shares some arranging sensibilities with its predecessor, making extensive use of pizzicato playing, rhythmic patterns, and non-standard bo wing techniques—the second movement is especially dramatic. // The other pieces are steps further removed from Debussy but still share elements with his String Quartet—notably the modal harmonic structures and tendency to call on the players to use odd techniques. Umezaki joins the quartet, playing a traditional Japanese wood flute called a shakuhachi—his Cycles (What Falls Must Rise) is a textural piece that incorporates electronic manipulation. Messina also joins the quartet, controlling electronics on his own string quartet arrangement of John Cage's 1948 composition In a Landscape, which was originally intended for piano or harp. It's a haunting piece to begin with, but this version, with its emphasis on high, sustained violin tones can make the hair stand up on your neck. It's Yanov-Yanovsky's ...Al Niente that also strives for the drama inherent to Debussy's work, creating a harmonic smear that full-bodied violin runs can leap out of at its beginning and proceeding through odd rippling passages to a quiet and long decay. // Dominant Curve succeeds in its attempt to bridge a classic work of a great composer with the work of that composer's stylistic descendants. Debussy's music and ideas still hold a lot of creative possibilities today. In performing the work of the man himself, Brooklyn Rider bring the "String Quartet in G Minor" vividly to life. On surrounding pieces, they extend invitations to listeners of modern minimalism and post-rock. With more work like this, Brooklyn Rider seem poised to earn attention on their own terms—regardless of which composers they work with.”—Pitchfork
“The Cage arrangement is beautifully cosmic...”
—The Mail and Globe
“NYC quartet Brooklyn Rider is made up of cellist Eric Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords and violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen. Their newest CD is called Dominant Curve, likely in homage to Wassily Kandinsky's 1936 painting of the same name. Indeed, the cover of the liner booklet, with artwork by Lennie Peterson echoes a few elements of the Kandinsky, albeit in a highly stylized fashion. Kandinsky's philosophy was that art, color and form could transform the spirit. He was a master of incorporating both sharp lines and amorphous figures into a cohesive, often whimsical, always compelling whole. // Which brings me to the music. Percussive, gristly attacks blend seamlessly with soaring melodies and electronic noise in in a piece by Kojiro Umezaki, (Cycles) what falls must rise, written for quartet, electronics and the Japanese bamboo flute, the shakuhachi. If you think you're not a fan of 'new' music, just close your eyes and give this a chance to tell its story. Me? I hear the persistent drone of cicadas, steam rising from the ground early on a humid morning... but there's something industrial about it as well, like an abandoned factory being reclaimed by nature. // Deconstruction and recreation is nature's endless cycle, and it's a common thread throughout this entire CD. Claude Debussy's String Quartet uses various permutations of the same melodic theme in each of its four movements. In turn, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky pulls a fragment of Debussy's theme, deconstructs it and rebuilds it in ...al niente. // One of Debussy's given names was Achille—Achilles—which was the inspiration for Brooklyn Rider's Colin Jacobsen to write Achille's Heel, a testament to the boundless creative inspiration one can find in a circle of friends. // At the heart of the CD is this: everything we create is actually a synthesis of everything we've ever heard and read and seen and smelled and felt... deconstructed and rebuilt through the filter of our own individual, unique experience.”
—Minnesota Public Radio (Valerie Kahler)
Press for Passport
Learning Musician
Brooklyn Rider, Passport
By Shulamit Kleinerman
"From the ensemble's name, you'd never know they're a classical string quartet. It's all part of the boundary-defying venture of these four innovative young players, who in addition to maintaining a claim on the mainstream classical repertoire have worked together on cross-cultural, cross-genre projects such as Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. They're hip in a geeky Brooklyn way (suspenders, facial hair). They're passionate and knowledgeable about art: their ensemble's name makes reference to the Blue Rider group in expressionist painting nearly a century ago. They do shows in clubs, galleries, and the occasional Buddhist temple. Everyone but the cellist plays standing up, and when the music calls for it, they dig into their instruments with the exuberance of racehorses let out of the barn.
The quartet's repertoire runs to new music with world-music flavors. Passport opens with an arrangement of five Armenian folk songs. One is broad and muscular, Copland for the South Caucasus; another is an elusive old-world sing-song. The thirteen-minute album centerpiece, second violinist Colin Jacobsen's "Brooklesca," begins with one of the most exhilarating half-minutes of chamber music I've heard. A touch of percussion sharpens the groove that's already there. The highlight of Passport is its last two tracks, by composer and fellow adventurous string player Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin. On "Crosstown," the upper strings ride a slinky plucked cello ostinato into a landscape of almost embarrassingly rich harmonies, vista after vista unfolding. The string quartet is traveling well in the 21st century, and you don't even need a classical-music passport to rock out with this one."
The Big Takeover: Music With Heart
Brooklyn Rider—Passport (In a Circle)
By Jack Rabid
After 20 soundalike indie rock bands (mediocre songwriting, too!), I popped this in and found myself menaced by an aggressive string quartet. Yipe! Now we're talking! This is not mainstream classical music or lite FM muzak. It's grabbing, cunningly confrontational chamber music like a horror movie tragedy score. Its tones evoke danger, pity, fear, and empathy, the violins, viola, and cello sharp as knives twisting and slithering like snakes, or plucking furtively like burglars sneaking past a sleeping dog. This natty Brooklyn quartet will soon tackle Phillip Glass... I liked this a lot, seeing movies in my head everywhere.
NPR
Invoking Improv: Best Classical CDs of 2008
By Fred Child
December 9, 2008
A composer writes the notes; musicians play the notes.
That's the current arrangement in the world of classical music, but it wasn't always so. Bach, Beethoven and Mozart were great composers, but they were also master improvisers. For centuries, it was a given that if you played music well, you improvised well.
Improvisation is now making a comeback in certain corners of the classical world. Some who play music from the 17th and 18th centuries have revived the tradition of improvising around what the composer wrote. And some young classical musicians who grew up with jazz, rock and world music feel as comfortable with improv as they do with interpretation.
Here are some of the choice 2008 classical CDs that include improvisation — or at least invoke its sound.
Artist: Brooklyn Rider
Album: Passport
A young string quartet from Brooklyn, all classically trained to within an inch of their lives, Brooklyn Rider also tours with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road project, gathering influences and inspiration from around the world. This wildly eclectic CD reflects its members' omnivorous tastes: haunting Armenian laments, Osvaldo Golijov's arrangement of a lovely ballad by the Mexican art-rock band Cafe Tacuba, and the driving Gypsy-inflected improvisations of Colin Jacobsen's tour de force "Brooklesca." Brooklyn Rider is recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.
Lucid Culture
Brooklyn Rider—Passport
November 4, 2008
Adventurous string quartet Brooklyn Rider have just released one of the year’s finest albums, Silent City (reviewed here recently), with brilliant Iranian composer/kamancheh (spike fiddle) player Kayhan Kalhor. In addition to that cd, this strikingly original, melodically rich and beautifully recorded collection showcases the group playing arrangements of dark Armenian folk songs as well as an original and two brief pieces by noted violist/composer Lev “Ljova” Zhurbin (also very recently reviewed here). It should resonate equally well with rock and world music audiences as well as classical fans: there’s literally something for everyone here.
eMusic
Brooklyn Rider—Passport
By Justin Davidson
Those of us who remember when portable music meant a shoulder-mounted boom box might also recall a time when the Kronos Quartet were the only string quartet to play music from territories west of Los Angeles, east of the Volga or south of the Mediterranean. The machines have shrunk, but string quartets have expanded their territory. Today's young ensembles don't even need to plunge into global internationalism; they've grown out of it.
The string quartet Brooklyn Rider came together for Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, so its interests lie well beyond the borough. Its first recording was Silent City, a bewitching collaboration with the Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor.
Passport, the group's almost contemporaneous second disc, is just as itinerant and equally seductive. It makes a fairly random assortment of cultural stops, from Yerevan to Mexico City to Forest Hills, Queens, all linked by a distinctive Brooklyn swing. The album opens with a suite of Armenian folk songs transcribed for string quartet by the priestly ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet and performed with muscular conviction and fragile wistfulness. It feels like a small hop to "La Muerte Chiquita," a ballad by the Mexican pop band Café Tacuba, which the composer Osvaldo Golijov has transformed through the application of perfumed lyricism and whispering harmonics.
The players of Brooklyn Rider are also members of an elastic society of New York-based musicians who treat the world's musical traditions as if they were separated by little more than a couple of subway stops. Another fellow traveler is Ljova, a violist and composer who specializes in what might be termed Eastern-European avant-folk and who wrote "Crosstown," a lovely nocturne with a plaintive sax-like solo above a bluesy plucked bass.
But the disc's keystone work is the 14-minute "Brooklesca" by the group's violinist Colin Jacobsen. It has the feeling of a shape-shifting, key-switching, rhythm-bending jam session, shot through with Persian motifs and Gypsy bravura. The beat is rock & roll-solid, the improvisational style elastic and relaxed, and the inventiveness assured. Jacobsen and his quartet mates play it as if the music were in their blood stream, or at least in the atmosphere of their heterogeneous borough.
Strings Magazine
Spins of the Week
By Greg Cahill
August 14, 2008
Reminiscent of the more established but no less adventurous Turtle Island and Kronos quartets, Brooklyn Rider is a gifted string quartet that mixes the classics with the contemporary to create music that is emotionally exhilarating and intellectually stimulating.
The quartet—Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello—is capable of creating a lush reading of Debussy's String Quartet in G minor one moment and an electrifying chamber-jazz spin on rock en español experimentalists Café Tacuba the next. That latter tune, "La Muerte Chiquita," arranged by contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, appears on Passport, one of the year's best chamber-music recordings. It is matched by five scintillating arrangements of Armenian folk songs, a pair of songs by the Russian violist and composer Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin, and a single original composition by Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen.
This is some of the most vibrant music I've heard this year, of any genre, and it arrives from a group that's been waiting in the wings for a few years. The notion that Brooklyn Rider has arrived is supported by the simultaneous release of Silent City, their stunning collaboration with Kurdish-Iranian kamancheh, or spike-fiddle, master Kayhan Kalhor. The group's rich timbre and ability to handle the demands of Kahlor's portamento-laden Persian modes and shifting tempos makes this challenging music a real thrill ride. Obviously, the group's longtime association with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble (they've participated in three Sony Classical recordings with that ensemble) has helped prepare the Brooklyn Rider for this stunning world-music summit meeting. Highly recommended.
Press for Silent City
Pitchfork
Review of Silent City
By Joe Tangari
January 23, 2009
Kayhan Kalhor is a Kurdish Iranian master of Persian music and one of the greatest living players of the kamancheh, a four-stringed, upright Persian fiddle that's tuned like a violin but has a darker tone; Brooklyn Rider is a young American string quartet in the tradition of the Kronos and Balanescu Quartets. Together, their repertoire is a mixture of classic string pieces, modern compositions, and originals composed by one of the group's violinists, Colin Jacobsen, and fleshed out by a talented bunch, equally comfortable improvising and playing complex arrangements as they are performing in concert halls and small rock clubs.
Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider met as members of Yo-Yo Ma's ambitious Silk Road Ensemble, a project seeking to unite the vast range of musical traditions along the historic trade route in a way that preserves each one but casts it in the context of something broad and modern. They continue in that spirit on Silent City, finding common ground between Persian folk and modern minimalism. The album's two short pieces, "Ascending Bird" and "Parvaz", bridge those genres directly, the former by adapting a piece of folk music, and the latter by retelling the same legend with a new composition by Kalhor. "Ascending Bird" balances slow and deliberate phrases from the quartet, with Kalhor's warm, searching kamancheh and frenzied santur (Persian hammer dulcimer) from guest Siamak Aghaei. Percussionist Mark Suter and double bassist Jeff Beecher are also on hand to widen the aural palette.
Colin Jacobsen's "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged" fuses a passage inspired by the Central-Asian Romeo & Juliet story Layla & Majnun with a 14th-century Italian song, beginning with a long, solemn meditation on the latter before swelling and finally bursting into its rhythmic second half. Engineer Jody Elff has brilliantly captured the detail and dynamic depth of the group, and this is most apparent on the half-hour centerpiece, Kalhor's magnificent composition "Silent City". It begins nearly inaudible, with a slow improvisation that gradually grows to a heaving, jaw-dropping climax around the 17-minute mark, only to break back down to an aching, kamancheh-led passage. Where the first climax comes with a sudden shift from dissonance to gorgeous consonance, the second is a cathartic, celebratory dance movement, with Suter returning to percussion.
Silent City has something for nearly everyone—classical music fans will appreciate the fine quality of the playing, world music aficionados will enjoy the cross-cultural currents, and it's very easy to see kids reared on post-rock and miminalist electronic music feeling at home here (if you've ever liked anything released on Kranky, you're almost certain to enjoy this). Experimentalism is always more rewarding when it leads to resounding emotional depth, and this is as good an example as you'll find of a group of musicians achieving that ideal balance.
Gramophone
From Brooklyn to Tehran
By Anastacia Tsioulcas
November 2008
A US-Iranian collaboration shows the musical riches that both cultures can share.
It is an age of overheated political polemics zinging back and forth between the US and Iran. Relief comes, though, in the form of a new collaboration between Kayhan Kalhor, an avowed master of Persian music, and the young and adventurous string quartet known as Brooklyn Rider: violinist Colin Jacobsen and his cellist brother Eric, violinist Jonathan Gandelsman and viola-player Nicholas Cords.
Perhaps the artistic distance is not too far to tread. Kalhor plays the upright four-stringed and bowed spiked fiddle called the kamancheh, an instrument with an extremely warm and nearly human voice. Its kinship with modern European string instruments, not to mention older ones like the rebec, is obvious. But it tkaes gifted and committed collaborators to fully realise that relationship, and these musicians' superbly conceived, organically evolved, and wonderfully rich recent collaboration, an album for the Harmonia Mundi imprint World Village called "Silent City", is proof of both their personal dedication and artistic insights...
Read Full Article (PDF: 900KB / 4 pages)
eMusic
Brooklyn Rider—Silent City
By John Schaefer
You can justifiably call this cross-cultural effort a spinoff of Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road Project. The string quartet with the quixotic name Brooklyn Rider consists of musicians who first met each other, and Persian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor, while working in Ma's globetrotting world/chamber music ensemble. Kalhor is a master of the kamancheh, the spike fiddle of Persian classical music, and has become a primary composer for the Silk Road albums. On "Silent City" he and his Brooklyn-based colleagues draw freely on their shared loves of traditional Central Asian music and improvisation — which sounds like a recipe for a mushy, politically correct album of Classical Lite. Instead, the album sounds like the next step in an evolution that comes from the tradition of Béla Bartók, who tramped around the Hungarian and Romanian countryside in the early 20th century, recording folk songs and dances and incorporating them into his own string pieces.
In addition to the bowed Western and Persian strings, "Silent City" also features bass and percussion, and the combination is used to good effect on the opening cut, "Ascending Bird," an exotic yet accessible work that wouldn't disappoint fans of Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir." Each of the four tracks offers something slightly different, from the haunted introspection of the title track, to the plucked sounds of the Iranian setar (a lute that is the ancestor of India's sitar) on "Parvaz," to the gradually building, almost trance-like ecstasy of the epic "Beloved, do not let me be discouraged." It's not Persian classical music, and you could reasonably ask if it's Western classical music either — but part of Brooklyn Rider's mission seems to be to suggest that we redefine what "Western classical music" means in the 21st century.
Sing Out Magazine
Silent City
By Derek Beres
Autumn 2008
The title track of this four-song recording clues you in it's nearly silent for a minute, and the slow build of violins, cello, viola and the Persian spiked fiddle, or kamancheh, takes the listener on an absolutely spellbinding tour of 29 minutes and 10 seconds. Thematically and sonically the music revolves around the theme that life always returns, and indeed the playing is a circular affair. After an intense climax, Kayhan Kalhor reintroduces his kamancheh in the seventeenth minute, and one is instantly transported to the dreamlike realm that made his work with Ghazal, The Masters of Persian Music, and with vocalists Ali Akbar Moradi and Mohammad Reza Shahjarian so special. There are few musicians like him—the very reason that the quartet Brooklyn Rider brought him in for this collaboration. All five men met during the initial recordings of YoYo Ma's ambitious Silk Road Project in 2000. The New York City-based foursome joined forces at this time, and stayed in touch with one of Iran's most respected artists. Brooklyn Rider themselves are worthy of praise violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, viola player Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen play with as much passion and integrity as anyone. It is, for the most part, a quiet record, though when Kayhor picks up the stringed setar, a flurry of notes and pictures emerge on "Parvaz," a musical retelling of the Persian legend Ascending Bird (which is the name of the first track). Mythology is a central focus on the entire album, even on the closing "Beloved, do not let me be discouraged," in which human love is transported to the lair of the divine. It is a fitting metaphor for this record at large, in which five players (and their guests on bass, santur, bodhran, etc.) have created something lasting and meaningful—about the most divine gift one can leave for the world.
Lucid Culture
Kayhan Kalhor & Brooklyn Rider—Silent City
September 9, 2008
Kayhan Kalhor is having a hard time doing anything wrong right now: pretty much everything the renowned Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) player touches turns into something magical. Like most of his contemporaries, Kalhor delights in cross-cultural collaboration, and this latest cd, created with inventive string quartet Brooklyn Rider is typical. Brisk, bracing, exhilarating and often wrenchingly haunting, it's a spectacularly successful achievement. It's less an attempt to blend East and West than simply a collaboration between friends. Kalhor – founder of the Dastan Ensemble, Ghazal Ensemble and Masters of Persian Music - has two lengthy compositions here, playing kamancheh and also santur (a four-string lute) on his own darkly rustling retelling of the Persian flight myth, Parvaz. Fascinatingly arranged by maverick violist/composer Ljova, its recurrent refrains slowly builds, inexorably gaining intensity.
Songlines Magazine
Top of the World
By Charles de Ledesma
October 2008
There are many ways you might have encountered Kayhan Kalhor’s music. An undisputed master of the kamancheh (spiked fiddle), Kalhor helped fuse Persian folk and classical music with Indian raga on Ghazal’s four CDs and is a founder of cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s incredible Silk Road Project. Here he pushes the boat out even further, joining ultra-contemporary US string quartet Brooklyn Rider for a sublime set of stunning new music.
Kalhor, who is Iranian, met the Rider foursome at a Silk Road Project workshop in the US in 2000. One inspiring visit to Iran later and Silent City began to evolve. Bassist Jeff Beecher, percussionist Mark Suter and santur player Siamak Aghaei were added to the line-up for the four tracks – one of which, the extended title-track, developed out of a live US performance in 2005. Whilst this piece has complex, contrasting movements – from racy string sections to panoramic ambient drones – it’s the other shorter pieces which work best on CD, literally raising the hairs on the back of the neck.
Silent City kicks off at a breathless pace on ‘Ascending Bird’, where Kalhor’s kamancheh holds its own among the twin violinists, Colin Jacobsen and Jonathan Gandelsman. ‘Parvaz’ and ‘Beloved’ are less racy, but, if anything, even more beautiful with Kalhor’s lute-like setar hypnotic on the former and the Rider quartet working as a single, pulsing musical membrane on the latter. This is outstanding, unforgettable music, overlapping East and Western classical and folk modes in a wonder of world fusion.
Spinner
Giving Voice to Silent City: Kayhan Kalhor Bridges Tehran and Brooklyn
By Steve Hochman
September 2, 2008
There are several intriguing angles one could take regarding Silent City, a new album combining the talents of Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor with the adventurous American string quartet Brooklyn Rider. An outgrowth of the musicians' experience as part of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble recordings and tours, this album comes at a time of ever-increasing tensions and rhetoric between the two countries' governments, a time when suspicion seems to trump reason and a time when more and more artists are seen as ambassadors of their cultures. And the title piece is emotionally stunning, a 29-minute musical Guernica, a threnody for the Kurdish village Hallabja that suffered the 1988 chemical weapons attack by Iraq that left 5,000 dead.
The New York Times
A Master Iranian Musician Plays Cultural Ambassador
By Vivien Schweitzer
August 26, 2008
In “Silent City,” a hypnotic work commemorating Halabjah, a Kurdish village annihilated by Saddam Hussein, the kamancheh, an upright four-stringed Persian fiddle, breaks out in a lamenting wail based on a traditional Turkish melody.
“Silent City” is included on a new disc of the same name on the World Village label, which Kayhan Kalhor, a virtuoso kamancheh player, recorded with the young string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
The work opens with a desolate murmuring improvised by the strings, eerily evoking the swirling dust of barren ruins, with a Kurdish melody heralding the rebuilding of the destroyed village. It has a particular resonance for Mr. Kalhor, 45, who was born in Tehran to a family of Kurdish descent. The sound of the kamancheh is “warm and very close to the human voice,” he said by phone from Tehran, where he now lives.
Strings Magazine
Spins of the Week
By Greg Cahill
August 14, 2008
Reminiscent of the more established but no less adventurous Turtle Island and Kronos quartets, Brooklyn Rider is a gifted string quartet that mixes the classics with the contemporary to create music that is emotionally exhilarating and intellectually stimulating.
The quartet—Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violins; Nicholas Cords, viola; Eric Jacobsen, cello—is capable of creating a lush reading of Debussy's String Quartet in G minor one moment and an electrifying chamber-jazz spin on rock en español experimentalists Café Tacuba the next. That latter tune, "La Muerte Chiquita," arranged by contemporary Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov, appears on Passport, one of the year's best chamber-music recordings. It is matched by five scintillating arrangements of Armenian folk songs, a pair of songs by the Russian violist and composer Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin, and a single original composition by Brooklyn Rider violinist Colin Jacobsen.
This is some of the most vibrant music I've heard this year, of any genre, and it arrives from a group that's been waiting in the wings for a few years. The notion that Brooklyn Rider has arrived is supported by the simultaneous release of Silent City, their stunning collaboration with Kurdish-Iranian kamancheh, or spike-fiddle, master Kayhan Kalhor. The group's rich timbre and ability to handle the demands of Kahlor's portamento-laden Persian modes and shifting tempos makes this challenging music a real thrill ride. Obviously, the group's longtime association with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble (they've participated in three Sony Classical recordings with that ensemble) has helped prepare the Brooklyn Rider for this stunning world-music summit meeting. Highly recommended.
Ensemble & Concert Reviews
Denver Post Fine Arts Critic
String Quartet Produces Knock-Out
By Kyle MacMillan
July 8, 2009
Brooklyn Rider's name suggests an indie-rock or jazz group, and that's the point. The string quartet has made its name by bucking convention—traversing musical boundaries, crossing cultural divides and embracing the new. It thrives on the unexpected, and that sense of adventure was continuously on exhibit during its knock-out concert Tuesday evening at the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder.
Even when playing a work by a classical mainstay, such as Claude Debussy, as it did to open the concert, it breaks from the usual. Instead of a common chamber work by the French composer, it performed a string-trio version of four sections from "Children's Corner," a solo piano piece dedicated to his daughter. Quickly demonstrating their classical chops, the three musicians offered an involved, suitably dynamic performance, making the most of violist Nicholas Cords' superb arrangement.
Besides the uncommon passion and energy that Brooklyn Rider brings to its playing, the young, all-male ensemble won over the audience with its informal demeanor, contemporary vibe and easy spontaneity.
It performed at least one work publicly for the first time Tuesday, and it significantly altered the program because one of its violinists, whose girlfriend is about to have a baby, could not make the trip. Without seeming the least bit bothered by such a last-minute change in plans, it invited two regular collaborators to join the group—bassist Jeffrey Beecher and pipa player Wu Man. Wu Man has done as much as anyone to transform the pipa, an ancient kind of Chinese lute, into a viable concert instrument. She became the star of the evening, with her extraordinary virtuosity and affable stage presence. She joined violinist Colin Jacobsen and cellist Eric Jacobsen in arguably the concert's highlight: "Ning," by Chen Yi, one of the now-famous Chinese composers to emerge after the Cultural Revolution. This riveting, at times intense, work manages to be alternately explosive, bleak and penetratingly poignant.
Much of the rest of the program was devoted to other internationally flavored works, offering a fresh, appealing take on what classical music can be in the 21st century.
The New York Times
Where There Was Once a Festival, a Marathon Continues to Run
By Allan Kozinn
June 2, 2009
In its early years in the late 1980s, the Bang on a Can Marathon was tough to characterize succinctly because there had never been anything quite like it. Not the isolated event it is now, it was the highlight of a festival that took over clubs and theaters in Greenwich Village for a couple of weeks, offering newly commissioned works, local premieres of scores that had made waves elsewhere, and certified modern classics by the likes of Harry Partch and John Cage. That was the festival; the marathon was just (a lot) more of it.
Given the festival’s downtown setting and sensibility, its programming leaned toward Minimalism and its precedents and offshoots. But atonal works (if rarely outright serialism) turned up too. So did various flavors of world music, jazz and the artier side of rock. And since boundary-skirting was important to all three of Bang on a Can’s founders — the composers Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang—works fusing these styles were often the marathons' anchors.
This year's marathon offered works by 28 composers on Sunday, from noon to just past midnight, at the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan. Like the last several, it was presented as a free concert, part of the River to River Festival. Early in the day listeners came and went, but by 5 p.m. the center's atrium (which holds 2,000) was packed, and it remained so to the end.
...Particularly pleasing among the American works was Evan Ziporyn's "Sulvasutra," a three-movement Silk Road of sorts: scored for string quartet, pipa and tabla, it was given a magnificently vital performance by Brooklyn Rider, Wu Man and Sandeep Das.
Classical Ear Blog
A String Quartet that Thrives on Cross-Culturalism
April 29th, 2009
"Audacious, informal, and energetic, Brooklyn Rider performs music that is not only cross-cultural but also cross-genre. The string quartet is named after the city in which it is based—quite fitting, considering the fact that Brooklyn is most famous for its vibrant multicultural background. On Monday, February 16th, the quartet gave a relaxed concert in FUEL, a trendy lounge in the basement of the Collis Center. Performing pieces that range from Franz Schubert and Philip Glass to Mexican rock and gypsy folk music, Brooklyn Rider seems to value pure musical enjoyment over technical prowess.
That night in FUEL, the quartet played seven extremely diverse pieces that were (paradoxically) united by a theme of cross-culturalism. After all the pieces had been performed, I was confused by the strange amalgam, but astounded by the sheer energy that the musicians had channeled. I was also amazed by the ease with which the musicians were able to shift from piece to piece (genre to genre, culture to culture, etc.) so seamlessly, as if no transition were taking place at all. After the concert, Johnny Gandelsman, the first violinist, was sure to explain the incongruousness of the repertoire that we had just heard. "This music," he told us, "is so diverse, but [it] has no boundaries." Only then was it apparent that the pieces were united by the diversity itself. Switching from traditional Japanese flute music to a jazzy blues melody was just as easy as walking from the Irish side of the street to the Jewish side of the street in Brooklyn, New York. The transitions were not meant to be jarring, but liberating.
The first piece of the night was called "Brooklesca," which—judging from a quick glance at Brooklyn Rider's website—is one of their most popular pieces. The piece, written by second violinist Colin Jacobsen, is a fast and vigorous adventure that combines gypsy themes, Spanish motifs, and American "hillbilly" fiddle, all in a vaguely classical milieu. Although that may sound confusing, the piece came together as a heart-pounding masterpiece, much of which was improvised. During one of Gandelsman's improvised solos, the cellist (Eric Jacobsen) even cracked a giggle! ...The second piece was Philip Glass's Company. Despite its repetitiveness, the musicians made it remarkably dynamic and gave it direction without taking too much artistic freedom. The next piece was a somber theme in variations by Schubert, which completely changed the mood... Next, the quartet played "La Muerte Chiquita", a tune made popular by a Mexican rock band. Full of glissandos, heavy pizzicatos, and percussive tapping, the piece had a spirited attitude. The fifth piece was a collaboration with shakuhachi player, Kojiro Umezaki. Despite my initial disbelief, the string instruments blended perfectly with the traditional Japanese flute, mostly through call-and-response imitation. Even though Umezaki frequently improvised and made great use of microtones (in between the notes of the normal tonal scale) the string players were able to copy him flawlessly. The concert ended with a piece written by Gandelsman's cousin, called Crosstown, a mimetic representation of a bus ride through Brooklyn, plagued by traffic and constant honking. As expected, the piece was comedically excruciating and playfully discordant, full of false starts and random changes in tempo. The piece was folksy and lyrical, and included Umezaki at one point as well...
By constantly experimenting with their instruments and playing music from all around the world, the quartet embodies the cross-culturalism of Brooklyn with avant-garde flair.
Pop & Hiss: The L.A. Times Music Blog
Live Review: Kayhan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider at UCLA's Royce Hall
By John Payne
April 5, 2009
Laying bare the links and contrasts between the traditional music of Persia and the modernist leanings of the Euro-American chamber ensemble, the Iranian kamancheh (spike fiddle) master Kayhan Kalhor was joined Saturday night at UCLA's Royce Hall by contemporary classical string quartet Brooklyn Rider.
Along with his border-crossing collaborations with the Kronos Quartet, Kalhor, of Kurdish descent, has earned acclaim for his alliances with Persian and Indian musicians in the Ghazal ensemble. He met the members of Brooklyn Rider when both became involved in Yo-Yo Ma's collaborative and charitable Silk Road Project in 2000. The partnership between Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider resulted in "Silent City," a 2008 album released on Harmonia Mundi's World Village label, and one that illustrated their mutual affinity for a gently experimental blending of seemingly disparate musical traditions.
The UCLA performance opened with a Persian traditional song called "Ascending Bird," arranged by Brooklyn Rider's Colin Jacobsen with noted santur musician Siamak Aghaei. Its complex layers of overlapping strings and coiling, vocal-like kamancheh—with a distant pitter-patter of hand percussion—conjured a vivid flight out of, perhaps, nocturnal quietude toward a shimmering, golden sun. Kalhor's "Parvaz" offered super-refined flickering tones enmeshed with the string ensemble's sinuous yet more strident strokes, producing a thrillingly opaque field of string sound.
Brooklyn Rider's core quartet presented a lusciously harmonized set of Armenian folk songs by Vartabed Komitas, performing several short, sweet works ranging in mood from the plaintive and coy to the mystical. The fruity, almost opulent sound of these songs felt simultaneously antiquated and modern, and suggested melodic and harmonic links between the regional traditions of Armenia, Iran and Turkey, along with the graceful impressionism of Western European composers such as Ravel and Debussy.
Kayhan and the ensemble also performed Jacobsen's "Beloved, Do Not Let Me Be Discouraged" and "Brooklesca," the former based on Fuzuli's 16th-century Turkic poem about ill-fated lovers and containing melodic references to the songs of 14th-century Italian troubadours... [The pieces] were further enlightened by fusions of far-flung traditions.
Commemorating Halabja, a Kurdish village in Iraq destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war by Iraqi forces, the evening's centerpiece was Kalhor's "Silent City," a mysterious, slowly evolving piece shrouded in stillness and cleverly colored by Kalhor and the string players' technique of simulating echo/reverb effects. A protracted, semi-improvised opening lament created a hovering, ruminatory air that gained not only a tension, but also a growing anticipation, eventually breaking out in a jubilant twine of tones exploding in all directions. It suggested the dawn of a new, better life.
Lucid Culture
Brooklyn Rider at Barbes
Brooklyn, December 10, 2008
December 11, 2008
Playing to a standing-room crowd in the back room of a Brooklyn bar, innovative string quartet Brooklyn Rider delivered a riveting, intense performance of some impressively eclectic material ranging from traditional Iranian and Armenian folksongs to classical and contemporary compositions. As visceral and intense as most of the set was, and as ever-present as the temptation to simply cut loose and go for the jugular must have been, the quartet managed to stay within themselves, maintaining a remarkable restraint and an uncannily subtle sense of dynamics. This made the crescendos - and there were a whole lot of them - all the more exhilarating.
New York Magazine
The Top Ten Classical Events
By Justin Davidson
December 7, 2008
6. Brooklyn Rider at the Brooklyn Lyceum
The borough’s chief string quartet teamed up with the Iranian fiddler Kayhan Kalhor for one of those cross-cultural evenings that might have made no sense at all but instead displayed a loose, magical logic. One of the quartet’s inaugural pair of CDs—titled Passport—captures some but not all of that night’s meandering beauties.
New York Magazine
In Small New-Music Venues, Failure is an Option—and a Route to Success
By Justin Davidson
January 27, 2008
On my first visit to the Brooklyn Lyceum in Park Slope, Fourth Avenue had reached that unique pitch of joylessness characteristic of a dismal urban artery on a rainy winter night. A sign in front of a closed auto-parts store flickered in the downpour, and passing cars slung their wakes against the occasional pedestrian. The Lyceum showed every one of its hundred years, but it was full of people happy to be hearing music they didn’t already know. Outside, the building still sports the markers of its former life as a public bath: women over one door, men on the other, and up near the cornice a flow of stylized water done in terra-cotta tiles. The cavernous interior has been scraped back to bare brick and given over to a mostly local assortment of live art and movies. On that night, hundreds packed in to hear the Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor and his cross-cultural partners, the string quartet called Brooklyn Rider.
The concert opened with a short set by Zulal, an a cappella trio of Armenian-American women who refract ancestral folk songs through the prism of the collegiate close-harmony group, and do so to spectacular effect. Then it was on to Iran, where violinist Colin Jacobsen had traveled, collecting melodies and arranging them for string quartet, in the spirit of the composer-ethnologist Béla Bartók. Kalhor eventually emerged to play his own piece for quartet and kamancheh, a Persian fiddle. Silent City began with a quiet, amorphous buzzing that gradually thickened and acquired urgency, its repetitive shivers intensifying into a fortissimo throb. That broke off, and the kamancheh wandered plaintively and alone into the still night, before rejoining the other strings in a section that for me evoked a Biedermeier parlor, full of Schubertian counterpoint and accompanying pizzicati. It was as if Silent City had started out on forlorn Fourth Avenue, traversed a hypnotic, exalted landscape, and somehow wound up in Vienna.
...New York’s complicated new-music scene is thriving: Here, and in an assortment of other non–concert halls where ticket prices are modest, the dress code is scruffy and the vibe is one of curiosity rather than reverence. A musically voracious crowd packs into bars, Tribeca art galleries, raw performance spaces in Brooklyn, and ad hoc rooms with folding chairs. One piece might offer a raucous electric explosion, another an incantatory murmur, and a third a throbbing romantic melody—or all of the above, in quick succession. It’s Soho in the seventies all over again, with more aesthetic variety. There’s bad (and mediocre, and flat-out lame) along with the good, to be sure, but that’s part of a healthy experimental-music world. Experiments fail, and in doing so they return results.
...Today’s young composers and freelance musicians have become entrepreneurial multitaskers. They organize concerts and master electric versions of their instruments. They double as mandolin players, countertenors, sound engineers, and publicists. They play each other’s music, attend each other’s concerts, and ladle each other’s successful ideas liberally into their own compositions. To pick one example among many, the Juilliard-trained violist Lev Zhurbin, also known as “Ljova,” has played with Yo-Yo Ma and appeared at Zankel Hall, and it was he who arranged Kalhor’s Silent City for string quartet. But he’s probably most at home with his band the Vjola Contraband, which I also heard at Joe’s Pub, performing what might be described as Eastern European avant-folk.
...Ironically, this underground scene can exist in part because the classical establishment has been both envious and supportive. Carnegie Hall commissioned Kalhor’s piece and has hosted many of the musicians. In return, events like these help keep the juggernauts healthy because they disprove the theory that audiences demand only greatness and a repertoire triple-filtered by history. That’s a form of condescension I have never understood. ...We don’t ask that every meal be reliably ambrosial. We don’t read only novels that we know will be transporting. In music, too, the public can tolerate disappointment in exchange for the nourishment that comes from a lack of expectations and the exciting uncertainty of not quite knowing how to judge.
The Strad Magazine
Brooklyn Rider at Bargemusic
December 2007
Brooklyn Rider, a young string quartet based in Brooklyn and consisting of members of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, is gradually building a presence in New York and beyond. Appearing at Bargemusic (12 September), the young ensemble gave the premiere of Brooklesca, an international medley of Chinese, Persian, gypsy, and klezmer styles written by the group's violinist Colin Jacobsen (the other members are violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords and cellist Eric Jacobsen).
As the title suggests, Brooklesca is a musical tour of the various nationalties that reside in New York's most populous borough, and with its driving rhythmic ostinatos, Eastern scales and quasi-improvised riffa, it could easily sound comfortable in a dark, smoky hookah bar. Joining the ensemble was the Chinese-American pipa player Wu Man, who not only enriched the group's texture but also provided an arrangement: Red, Blue and Green for pipa, quartet and percussion, a short gypsy-flavored piece written by the New York composer Ljova. Also on the program was an elegant and sturdy reading of the Brahms String Quartet in A minor op. 51 no.2.
The New Yorker
September 17, 2007
Few young artists are as versatile as the four gentlemen of the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, whose members—the violist Nicholas Cords, violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen and Jacobsen's cello-playing brother, Eric—are veterans of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road project as well as expert advocates for the classical repertory.
Newark Star Ledger
August 21, 2006
...They had selected such an interesting program and played it with a rawness and verve that was gripping in the Barge's intimate space... This was beautiful listening.
The Williams Record
March 15, 2005
The group’s skill and refined technique was evident from the very beginning of the first piece, “Standchen.” They did not exaggerate their dynamics as some performers feel pressured to do when confronted with the expanses of Chapin Hall, trying to fill its entire inner chamber with sound. Instead, they tastefully held back whenever the music required it, sometimes quieting down to nearly a whisper.
... (Williams College) music department’s recent Debussy marathon ended with that French composer’s Eastern-influenced “String Quartet in G Minor.” The work, better-known than the other pieces on the program, was interpreted masterfully...
The quartet took a surprisingly flowing, legato reading of the resolute first movement, focusing far more on their sound as an ensemble than on solo performances. ...the overall effect was beautiful.
The performers were especially animated during this piece, nearly bouncing out of their chairs – and yes, breaking a bow hair or two in the process. Their playing throughout was entrancing not only in its energy, but in its sheer virtuosity; they turned in a performance of the Debussy quartet that, like the rest of the concert that had preceded it, was nothing short of astounding.