Celebrity Series of Boston: Nicholas Phan & Brooklyn Rider
$20 ($18 CS Friends Circle Members)
Nico Muhly — Stranger
Thomas Campion — Never weather-beaten sail
Franz Schubert — String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 "Death and the Maiden"
Nicholas Phan, tenor
Johnny Gandelsman, violin
Colin Jacobsen, violin
Nicholas Cords, viola
Michael Nicolas, cello
Thomas Campion – Never weather-beaten sail
Rufus Wainwright, arr. Colin Jacobsen – Trois valses anglaises (Boston premiere)
Nico Muhly – Stranger (Boston premiere)
Franz Schubert – String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810 "Death and the Maiden"
Tenor Nicholas Phan teams up with adventurous string quartet Brooklyn Rider for a performance that places the past and present in direct and powerful dialogue.
The program features two Boston premieres, Rufus Wainwright’s Trois valses anglaises and Nico Muhly’s Stranger, a song cycle for tenor and string quartet commissioned for Mr. Phan and Brooklyn Rider, that connects and illuminates four American stories: an academic history of Chinese railroad workers, the personal narrative of an immigrant from Sicily, a Chinese-American man fighting legal discrimination, and a wife’s letter to her deployed husband in World War II.
The program also features a new phase of work exploring love and death through the music of Franz Schubert and Rufus Wainwright, a bold compositional pairing that reinforces these artists’ fearless rejection of presenting the obvious. Wainwright, an American-Canadian composer and songwriter not yet 50 years old, is an enormous fan of Schubert, and in the hands of these cleverly genre-crossing musicians, he, too, has a place in the same musical world as the Austrian icon 200 years his senior. The Boston premiere of Wainwright’s Trois valses anglaises sits alongside Schubert’s stormy "Death and the Maiden" quartet, a longtime mainstay of the chamber music repertoire.
Brooklyn Rider is Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen (violins), Nicholas Cords (viola), and Michael Nicolas (cello), joined by Nicholas Phan (tenor) for the first part of the program.
Note – Artist change: Due to complications with continued travel restrictions as a result of COVID-19, Anne Sofie von Otter is unable to perform at this concert.
The broadcast will begin at 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific. Streaming live from GBH Calderwood Studio and available on demand until Thurs., November 18, 2021 at 7pm Eastern / 4pm Pacific.