Johnny Gandelsman, violin

Colin Jacobsen, violin

Nicholas Cords, viola

Michael Nicolas, cello

“A string quartet of boundless imagination.”  —NPR

"I don't believe I've ever experienced the radical emotional range of Op. 132's long, slow movement — with its liberating, dancing interjections — more intensely than when listening to the entirety of Healing Modes.”  —The New York Times

Celebrating twenty years of shared musical exploration, Brooklyn Rider originated in a living room, four friends in search of an outlet for their curiosities. Inspired by the probing spirit of Germany’s pre-WW1 artistic collective Der Blaue Reiter, they recognized parallels with their creative community in Brooklyn at the time and began to build projects. In the following two decades, Brooklyn Rider has undertaken a staggering amount of work, carving a singular space in the world of string quartets. Through thoughtful programmatic framing, deep-rooted collaborations, and innovative commissioning projects, Brooklyn Rider has used the medium at every point in their adventurous journey as a vehicle for exploration and discovery. Inspired equally by the rich repertoire of the past and the limitless canvas of new creation, Brooklyn Rider seeks to create meaningful and memorable experiences for their audiences.

To mark the twenty-year milestone, a wide range of projects were developed to celebrate the key elements of their work. Honoring a long-standing relationship with the string quartets of Philip Glass (String Quartet # 3, Mishima was on Brooklyn Rider’s first public program), Brooklyn Rider embarked on the first ever retrospective of the composer’s complete works for the medium. Initially presented by the Yale Schwarzman Center in 2024, the retrospective continued in May 2025 at the Met Cloisters in NYC before heading further afield. A major commission by Gabriela Lena Frank, Frida’s Dreams receives its premiere in the 2025-26 season. A large-scale recording project, The Four Elements (releasedspring of 2025) serves as a dual metaphor for the complex inner world of the string quartet and the future of planet Earth, the latest example of the kind of programmatic concept long associated with Brooklyn Rider. The quartet expands their reach into the orchestral world in future seasons with a new work for quartet and orchestra by Nico Muhly, to be presented by a wide-ranging consortium of orchestras across Europe and North America. Lastly, a special concert at Tanglewood in August 2025 featured the Schubert Cello Quintet as the centerpiece alongside the quartet’s friend and mentor Yo-Yo Ma.

The beginning days of Brooklyn Rider’s history included numerous self-produced concerts events, and the quartet has since cherished the live performance experience in its many guises. In more recent years, the quartet has made regular appearances in many of the major musical centers of North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia - from Zurich’s Tonhalle, Carnegie Hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, the Sydney Opera House, the National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing, and London’s Wigmore Hall. Comfortable in a wide range of performance outlets, they have also appeared on the main stage of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival, and in two NPR Tiny Desk Concerts. Audiences across the Netherlands saw Brooklyn Rider in a collaborative program with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and The Tallest Man on Earth in 2024. Brooklyn Rider has been the long-standing resident string quartet of the Vail Dance Festival, collaborating with many of the finest dancers and choreographers of our time. They have also been privileged to use the balming powers of music at deeply challenging moments along the way. The quartet made a special appearance at a Buddhist Temple in the decimated fishing village of Kesennuma, Japan in the months following the devastating 2011 tsunami. Most recently, Brooklyn Rider played an all-Glass concert at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills in the midst of the 2025 Los Angeles area fires.

Brooklyn Rider has remained steadfast in their commitment to generate new music for string quartet at every phase of their history. Through commissioning, collaborative exploration, and the inimitable works of BR’s own Colin Jacobsen, the quartet has left a lasting contribution to the repertoire. The upcoming season will unveil a new program called Citizenship Notes with commissioned works by Don Byron, Ted Hearne, and Angélica Negrón. In 2017, Brooklyn Rider released Spontaneous Symbols (In a Circle Records), featuring new works for Brooklyn Rider by Tyondai Braxton, Evan Ziporyn, Paula Matthusen, Kyle Sanna, and Colin Jacobsen. For their tenth anniversary in 2015-16, they celebrated with the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary project The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured fifteen commissioned works by musicians from the folk, jazz, and indie rock worlds. A recent second book of the BR Almanac includes works by Clarice Assad, Gabriel Kahane, Giovanni Sollima, Tyshawn Sorey. The quartet has also enjoyed relationships with composers John Luther Adams, Reena Esmail, Osvaldo Golijov, Philip Glass, Matana Roberts, Caroline Shaw, Du Yun, John Zorn, to mention a few.

Brooklyn Rider has had a voracious appetite for recording since their inception, encapsulating their wide-ranging projects and programmatic frames. Shared at the height of the US lockdown, the Grammy®-nominated recording Healing Modes (In A Circle Records) was described by The New Yorker as a project which "...could not possibly be more relevant or necessary than it is currently." The Butterfly (In A Circle Records), an album which the Irish Times described as “a masterclass in risk-taking,” explored a collaboration with the legendary Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. Sun On Sand (Nonesuch Records), featured the music of Patrick Zimmerli with saxophone giant Joshua Redman and fellow collaborators Scott Colley on bass and Satoshi Takeishi, percussion. Their first ever live concert recording, The Wanderer (In A Circle Records) made at Paliesius Manor in eastern Lithuania in the beginning days of the War in Ukraine, including two works written recently for Brooklyn Rider: Gonzalo Grau’s Aroma a distancia (nominated for a Latin Grammy®) and Osvaldo Golijov’s Um Dia bom. 

Numerous other collaborations have helped give rise to NPR Music’s observation that Brooklyn Rider is “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” 2023 saw the release of Starlighter (In A Circle Records), a collaborative venture with Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmah and percussionist Mathias Kunzli (“thrilling stuff…” Arts Desk, UK). The 2021-22 season boasted two unique partnerships: one with Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital, and the other a new chapter of work with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter (following So Many Things on Naïve Records, 2016). 2022’s The Stranger (Avie Records) with tenor Nicholas Phan was nominated for a 2023 Grammy® award and made numerous best-of lists, including The New Yorker. In fall 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera which topped charts and garnered a Grammy® nomination for best arrangement (Gonzalo Grau’s “Niña”). Some Of A Thousand Words, was an evening-length exploration with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, A collaboration with Dance Heginbotham with music written by Colin Jacobsen resulted in Chalk And Soot, an evening-length work presented by Lincoln Center’s White Lights Festival in 2014. Brooklyn Rider has also frequently teamed up with banjoist Béla Fleck, with whom they appeared on two different albums, 2017’s Juno Concerto and 2013’s The Impostor. And in one of their longest-standing musical friendships to date, Brooklyn Rider and Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor released the highly praised recording Silent City (World Village) in 2008, a project which is still touring to this day.  

Since its inception, Brooklyn Rider has maintained a careful balance between the activities of the string quartet and the individual artistic lives of its members. Violinist Johnny Gandelsman, a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, maintains a busy musical life between solo projects and his work as founder and producer for In A Circle Records, which has released his three highly celebrated solo albums, numerous soundtracks for documentary film maker Ken Burns, and many of Brooklyn Rider’s key releases over the years. Violinist Colin Jacobsen - an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient - is a noted composer and arranger, and together with his brother Eric (Brooklyn Rider’s founding cellist) is Co-Artistic Director of the omnivorous orchestral collective The Knights. He is also the Artistic Director of Santa Fe Pro Musica. Violist Nicholas Cords is on the full-time faculty of New England Conservatory where he maintains a busy viola studio, coaches chamber music, and teaches a course on the early recorded history of string playing. He was formerly Co-Artistic Director of Silkroad. Cellist Michael Nicolas is a valued member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, a long-time collaborator with the iconic musician John Zorn, and former Associate Principal Cello of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. He serves on the faculty of Mannes School of Music at the New School.