Béla Fleck & Brooklyn Rider
Bio
Legendary banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck teams up with the unsurpassably inventive string quartet Brooklyn Rider for an evening of music anchored by recorded Night Flight Over Water, Béla’s quintet for banjo and string quartet, as well as works from Brooklyn Rider’s versatile repertoire, solo turns by Béla, and other collaborative surprises. This prolific quintet began touring the program in New York City in November 2013 and have continued throughout North America. Slipping seamlessly between the diverse worlds of American roots music and classical, these five musicians reveal a rich range of musical possibilities.
“Night Flight Over Water, is more complex and fascinating because of the built-in tensions between the five-string instruments in both ensemble and solo play. They allow not only for a unique exploration of the classical quintet form, as Fleck seeks to explore not only the possibilities for his own instrument as interloper and collaborator, but also as a tonal and harmonic inquiry at once playful and sophisticated.” -All Music
“Never do we think the banjoist could be so risk-taking, so disturbingly mischievous, and so willing to take the backseat for the greater good of the art…a stirring testament to his undeniable gift of storytelling without speaking a word.” - Altoriot
About Brooklyn Rider
Johnny Gandelsman, violin / Colin Jacobsen, violin / Nicholas Cords, viola / Michael Nicolas, cello
Hailed as “the future of chamber music” (Strings), Brooklyn Rider offers eclectic repertoire in gripping performances that continue to attract legions of fans and draw rave reviews from classical, world, and rock critics alike.
Last season, the group celebrated its tenth anniversary with the groundbreaking multi-disciplinary project Brooklyn Rider Almanac, for which it recorded and toured 15 commissioned works, each inspired by a different artistic muse. This season, Brooklyn Rider released So Many Things with Anne Sofie von Otter on Naïve Records, which includes music by Colin Jacobsen, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, Björk, Kate Bush and Elvis Costello, among others. Their tour together included stops at Carnegie Hall and the Opernhaus Zurich.
After performances at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in July, the quartet will tour the U.S. with choreographer Brian Brooks and former New York City Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, performing Some of a Thousand Words. Using music from a diverse array of composers, the series of duets and solos featuring Brooks and Whelan foregrounds the live music of the quartet as a dynamic creative component.
Other recent recordings include 2016’s The Fiction Issue with music by Gabriel Kahane, 2013’s A Walking Fire on Mercury Classics and The Impostor with Béla Fleck on Deutsche Grammophon/Mercury Classics, plus 2011’s much-praised Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass on the composer’s Orange Mountain Music label.
