Brooklyn Rider chase moments of rare truths and living tradition
American string quartet Brooklyn Rider return to Adelaide to headline UKARIA’s Chamberfest 25, where they’ll perform five concerts while reflecting on the healing power of music.
The good folk of Brooklyn Rider have got their work cut out for them.
After a “deeply memorable” visit to UKARIA last year, the world-renowned string quartet returns to South Australia to perform in the newly minted Chamberfest, formerly UKARIA 24.
They’ve also curated an impressive program.
Running since 2016 under the UKARIA 24 banner, the three-day chamber music festival will be held from October 31 – November 2 at the iconic cultural centre on beautiful Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills, with Brooklyn Rider will perform five concerts across the weekend
It’s the first time an ensemble has been invited to curate the program – another highlight for the collective to add to its “auspicious” 20th anniversary year.
UKARIA is a special place for artists, as violist and founding member Nick Cords explains from New York.
“The team at UKARIA is so amazing,” Cords tells InReview, fresh home from performing in Frankfurt. “It’s a team that really works with artists to help realise a vision. It’s also a place that [doesn’t put] up a lot of barriers to what an artist wants to do.
“One of the reasons we wanted to come back was we were given this incredible opportunity to curate a whole weekend of shows. Opportunities to do that in the world are rare.”
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The annual festival is held in spring to make the most of UKARIA’s surrounds; with spectacular views of Mount Barker forming the backdrop as musicians perform, the place is as breathtaking as the music it creates space for.
“This is inspiring,” Cords agrees. “[At] UKARIA you are part of the land. You are part of the atmosphere, the place. You live there. You breathe that air. And this does funnel down to how you make music.
“There’s something about this sort of magical triangle between the land, the audience and the team there that just creates this really ripe environment to make music.”
Chamberfest audiences are in for a treat. Gifted and intense performers, Brooklyn Rider’s gift is the willingness to experiment. Embedded in chamber music, equally, the quartet works to “move the tradition forward.”
"We wanted to use the string quartet to mirror the very diverse group of pieces that is really part and parcel of the string quartet tradition, which is very much a ‘living tradition’ in addition to a historical one."
“We’ve always tried to define the quartet with a really broad umbrella,” Nick says, reflecting on the band’s 20-year legacy and the curatorial process.
“We wanted to use the string quartet to mirror the very diverse group of pieces that is really part and parcel of the string quartet tradition, which is very much a ‘living tradition’ in addition to a historical one,” he adds.
“We want to give every sense of that dimension possible over the course of five concerts.”
As comfortable playing Carnegie Hall as Tiny Desk concerts, this “Brotherhood of the Bow” brings a range of musical styles and compositions to Chamberfest – from cabaret to Cage, “Bach to Bob Dylan”.
“This is music that we already knew and loved by people who are close to the quartet – or share very few degrees of separation to the group,” he explains. “We have at least three or four works by Australian composers.”
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Cords says collaboration is in Brooklyn Rider’s “DNA”, and they’re “thrilled” to be sharing the stage with other artists at Chamberfest.
“[The program is] scattered with music from Australian composers for which we didn’t have to work so hard to find,” he smiles.
“We’re collaborating with two dancers from Australia. One, Melissa Toogood, is a very old friend,” adding there’s also, “a collaboration with new friends from the Australian National Academy of Music.”
“It also gives us an opportunity to program some really fun music with them, including a piece [by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov] that we’ve actually been wanting to play for quite some time.”
Twenty years ago, Brooklyn Rider was inspired by namesake The Blue Rider, a group of progressive European artists who, in the dark days before World War One invited the world to listen to a new kind of conversation. Chamberfest gives Brooklyn Rider a chance to have its own conversation with UKARIA’s “curious, close listening audience” around a number of compelling themes.
Democracy is one, healing another.
I ask Nick whether we might be in another ‘moment’ when the world needs healing,
“Yes,” he says, taking time to answer. “And I can’t think of a single point in the entire history of civilisation in which it wouldn’t have been true.
“I definitely think it’s true now.
“Despite all the ways that we have invented to be connected with each other, nothing really replaces being in a room and focused around ‘a thing’ – a meal, conversation, a concert.
“We live in a time in which people feel like it’s harder to tell truth from fiction,” he says. “We have less ability to hear each other when we’re talking … and in a concert, we can, for a moment, be totally removed from that.
“To me it’s a moment of truth – of rare truth.”
A true believer in the beauty and potential for healing that the “shared resonance” of live performance offers, Cords reflects, “Even in hard times I think art – and music – finds a way to do what it’s doing.
“I’m very optimistic about the resiliency of music and our artform to survive. That gives me a lot of strength.”
Chamberfest 25 runs from Friday October 31 – Sunday November 2 at UKARIA Cultural Centre