Brooklyn Rider: Healing Modes

Written only two years before his death, the fifteenth string quartet of Ludwig van Beethoven is a testament to resilience and deliverance. In particular, its third movement—“Song of Holy Thanksgiving From a Convalescent to the Deity in the Lydian Mode”—is a passage of pure redemption, written after the composer’s extended illness. Rising from broad swathes of elegiac gray to stir slowly awake, it sparkles with the joy of life and ends with arms outstretched in a moment of triumph. It is so powerful and, in this rife political moment, salient that it inspired borderless string quartet Brooklyn Rider to build “Healing Modes,” a new concert based upon the balm that music can be.

Lauded as “a string quartet of boundless imagination” by NPR, Brooklyn Rider has collaborated with the likes of banjo master Béla Fleck, Iranian virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, and Mexican jazz singer Magos Herrera. For “Healing Modes,” they express this breadth through commissions from an international cadre of five women composers—recent Pulitzer winners Caroline Shaw and Du Yun, avant-jazz provocateur Matana Roberts, and polyglots Gabriela Lena Frank and Reena Esmail. Their pieces examine scenarios of healing, from the Biblical to those of the United States’ fractured Southern border. Brooklyn Rider presents them alongside all of Beethoven’s fifteenth quartet, the anchor for a necessary night of musical redemption.

Program:

Caroline Shaw: Schisma
Gabriela Lena Frank: Kanto Kechua No. 2
Du Yun: i am my own achilles’ heel, a form that would never shape
Mantana Roberts: borderlands...
Reena Esmail: Zeher (Poison)
Ludwig van Beethoven: Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132

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Stay tuned for details on the food and beverage experience for this performance.