New Classical Tracks: The Brooklyn Rider Almanac

Brooklyn Rider — The Brooklyn Rider Almanac — Mercury Classics

For the past couple of years, the genre-bending ensemble Brooklyn Rider has been digging into a project that violist Nicholas Cords believes speaks to why it's a string quartet in the first place.

"We try to find music that creates many different kinds of connections for different types of listeners," Nicholas says. "This project is really about asking composers from different genres to write pieces that are influenced by heroes of theirs — who are other artists, musicians, painters, writers. And I think immediately we develop the sense in this project that there are so many places to plug into — for us, the composers and our audience.

"These pieces are all designed to be somewhat on the shorter side," Nick adds, "which actually provides an interesting place in terms of how you program a concert — because a lot of the standard quartet repertory are extended four-movement works. But there is so often a need for smaller, interstitial pieces in a program, and I think these pieces will serve us for years to come, in that regard."

Violinist Colin Jacobson explains that this project, called The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, is inspired by a 100-year-old, cross-disciplinary project that traces the roots of its name. "Brooklyn Rider is our admiration for the Blue Rider Group of Munich about 100 years ago that consisted of people like Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg," Colin says. "They put together an almanac or a sort of artistic manifesto of their time that was incredibly eclectic — articles about different ways of painting, of medieval folk art, of so-called non-Western art at the time. And we just loved the idea of all those art forms mingling, which gave inspiration for our name. It just seemed natural, as we approached our 10th anniversary, to go back to those roots and use them as inspiration to develop our own project."

Folk singer and songwriter Aoife O'Donovan's contribution to this project is a fiddle-based tune filled with nostalgia. It's titled "Show Me." Colin says Aoife's song was inspired by author William Faulkner. "She was reading a book of his on a train," Colin says, "and in that book there's a moment where the character has gone down to the river or the body of water and is reflecting upon life and what is it worth. The second part of this tune is very fiddle-influenced. It's beautiful."

One goal for this project, according to violinist Johnny Gandelsman, is to enrich the quartet repertoire overall. "Five-legged Cat" by Gonzalo Grau is one he thinks other groups will have a lot of fun playing.

"It's Venezuelan merengue," Johnny says, "and Gonzalo was inspired by Chick Corea, but drawing inspiration also from his homeland's folk rhythms, a lot of which happen in 5/8. Hence — the 'Five-Legged Cat'."

Nick says performing this piece is a thrill because it expands the sonic sound of the string quartet. "There are many times in this piece where we act as percussion," he says. "That might involve stomping on the floor or it might involve some of these things that you hear in Piazzolla's music — scratching behind the bridge and making non-pitched sounds. Hitting the wood of the bow on the string — not the hair but just making this kind of percussive, woody, tapping sound. And there's also literally tapping on the instrument body itself, which is such a resonant body that it creates a whole world of sound. Somehow putting these sounds together, it sounds like string quartet plus drum set."

The pieces that make up The Brooklyn Rider Almanac are quickly becoming part of the quartet's concert season. After each performance, everyone seems to have a different favorite, which Johnny says is another reason this is a very special project.

"I think the breadth of material that we have is fantastic," he says. "It took a while to record all this music. And as always in the studio, studio time can be intense but just the diversity of all this music and the different kind of states of mind that we had to go into on very quick notice, to get as close to the spirit of the piece as possible, was really fun. And I think that's a great thing about the album — how diverse the pieces are and how many different worlds we tried to get to." Those different worlds have now come together in this new disc, The Brooklyn Rider Almanac. Future plans for this project could include working with choreographers or animators, as this adventurous quartet continues to make new connections.

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