Celebrating twenty years of shared musical exploration, Brooklyn Rider originated in a living room, four friends in search of an outlet for their curiosities. Inspired by the probing spirit of Germany’s pre-WW1 artistic collective Der Blaue Reiter, they recognized parallels with their creative community in Brooklyn at the time and began to build projects. In the following two decades, Brooklyn Rider has undertaken a staggering amount of work, carving a singular space in the world of string quartets. Through thoughtful programmatic framing, deep-rooted collaborations, and innovative commissioning projects, Brooklyn Rider has used the medium at every point in their adventurous journey as a vehicle for exploration and discovery. Inspired equally by the rich repertoire of the past and the limitless canvas of new creation, Brooklyn Rider seeks to create meaningful and memorable experiences for their audiences.

To mark the twenty year milestone, a wide range of projects are on the horizon for 2025 and beyond that celebrate the key elements of their work. Honoring a long-standing relationship with the string quartets of Philip Glass (String Quartet # 3, Mishima was on Brooklyn Rider’s first public program), Brooklyn Rider has embarked on the first ever retrospective of the composer’s complete works for the medium. Initially presented by the Yale Schwarzman Center, the retrospective was repeated at the Met Cloisters in NYC in May 2025. A major commission by Gabriela Lena Frank, Frida’s Dreams is due for the 2025-26 season. Their latest recording, The Four Elements (May 2025, In A Circle Records) serves as a dual metaphor for the complex inner world of the string quartet and the future of planet Earth, the latest example of the kind of programmatic concept long associated with Brooklyn Rider. The quartet expands their reach into the orchestral world in upcoming seasons with a major new work for quartet and orchestra by Nico Muhly, to be presented by a wide ranging consortium of orchestras across Europe and North America. This summer, the quartet presented a mini festival “Brooklyn Rider; Twenty Years At Play” at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in August as well as a special concert at Tanglewood which featured the Schubert Cello Quintet alongside the quartet’s friend and mentor Yo-Yo Ma.

The beginning days of Brooklyn Rider’s history included numerous self-produced concerts events, and the quartet has since cherished the live performance experience in its many guises. In more recent years, the quartet has made regular appearances in many of the major musical centers of North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia – from Zurich’s Tonhalle, Carnegie Hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, the Sydney Opera House, the National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing, and London’s Wigmore Hall. Comfortable in a wide range of performance outlets, they have also appeared on the main stage of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival, at Austin’s South By Southwest Music Festival, and in two NPR Tiny Desk Concerts. Brooklyn Rider has been the long-standing resident string quartet of the Vail Dance Festival, collaborating with many of the finest dancers and choreographers of our time. They have also been privileged to use the balming powers of music at deeply challenging moments along the way. The quartet made a special appearance at a Buddhist Temple in the decimated fishing village of Kesennuma, Japan in the months following the devastating 2011 tsunami. Most recently, Brooklyn Rider played an all Glass concert at the Wallis Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills in the midst of the 2025 Los Angeles area fires.

Brooklyn Rider has remained steadfast in their commitment to generate new music for string quartet at every phase of their history. Through commissioning, collaborative exploration, and the inimitable works of BR’s own Colin Jacobsen, the quartet has left a lasting contribution to the repertoire. Shared at the height of the US lockdown, the Grammy®-nominated recording and commissioning project Healing Modes (In A Circle Records) was described by The New Yorker as a project which “…could not possibly be more relevant or necessary than it is currently.” The upcoming season will unveil a new program called Citizenship Notes with commissioned works by Don Byron, Ted Hearne, and Angélica Negrón.

Brooklyn Rider has had a voracious appetite for collaboration since their inception, encapsulating their wide-ranging projects and programmatic frames and giving rise to NPR Music’s observation that Brooklyn Rider is “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” The Butterfly (In A Circle Records), an album which the Irish Times described as “a masterclass in risk-taking,” explored a collaboration with the legendary Irish fiddler Martin Hayes. The 2021-22 season boasted two unique partnerships: one with Israeli mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital, and the other a new chapter of work with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter (following So Many Things on Naïve Records, 2016). 2022’s The Stranger (Avie Records) with tenor Nicholas Phan was nominated for a 2023 Grammy® award and made numerous best-of lists, including The New Yorker. In fall 2018, Brooklyn Rider released Dreamers on Sony Music Masterworks with Mexican jazz vocalist Magos Herrera which topped charts and garnered a Grammy® nomination for best arrangement (Gonzalo Grau’s “Niña”). Other collaborators include former NYC Ballet prima ballerina Wendy Whelan, banjo icon Béla Fleck, jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and the Iranian kemancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor.

Dane Lam is an Australian-Chinese-Singaporean conductor known for performances that unite precision with passion, and for a rare ability to lead across borders — musically, geographically, and institutionally. He moves between opera and symphonic music with equal fluency and has built a career defined not only by international reach, but by the artistic and civic renewal he brings to the organizations he serves.

The only conductor in the world to hold leadership positions at major musical institutions in the United States, Australia, and Asia, Dane is Music and Artistic Director of the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia, and Principal Conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra. Few conductors lead major ensembles on three continents — and even fewer do so while commissioning new work, expanding audiences, and strengthening cultural identity in each place.

In Hawai‘i, since his appointment in 2023, Dane has led a resurgence of the Symphony’s role in civic life. He has introduced televised concerts, launched the HapaSymphony series blending classical and Hawaiian music, expanded audiences to record levels, and commissioned new works from across the Pacific alongside core repertoire in his Masterworks program. In 2024–25, he led the orchestra’s first complete Beethoven Symphony Cycle in its 125-year history — pairing Beethoven with Pacific Rim composers such as Ye Xiaogang and reviving the music of Honolulu-born Dai-Keong Lee (1915–2005), neglected for decades. His programming places Beethoven beside local legends and new voices beside overlooked ones, reframing tradition for a living community.

In Adelaide, as Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia, he is reimagining the company as a globally connected institution rooted in local voice. His seasons pair beloved repertoire with new operas by Missy Mazzoli, Nardi Simpson, and Jonathan Dove, and visionary co-productions with Scottish Opera, San Francisco Opera, Canadian Opera Company, and Irish National Opera. He made his mainstage debut as Artistic Director in 2024 with Così fan tutte, and in 2025 he led a new Magic Flute — the first-ever Australia–China opera co-production — and the world première of SOSA–Irish National–West Australian Opera’s Roméo et Juliette.

The company’s 50th Anniversary Golden Jubilee season in 2026 will feature four brand new productions, the first babies’ opera ever produced outside Europe, and an ambitious program of regional and touring activity — an unprecedented scale of new work for an Australian opera company.

In 2014, Dane was appointed Principal Conductor of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra — the first non-Chinese conductor to hold such a position with a major Chinese orchestra. Under his leadership, XSO has become one of the nation’s most artistically vibrant and institutionally secure ensembles. The orchestra has welcomed artists of the calibre of José Carreras, Midori, Stephen Hough, and Barry Douglas; launched Xi’an’s first full scale opera productions; and presented its inaugural Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler symphony cycles. The 2016 televised Mid-Autumn Festival Gala, featuring the Xi’an Symphony, reached a global audience of hundreds of millions.

Dane was a leading figure in Australia’s post-pandemic cultural revival. As early as August 2020, he conducted the first full-capacity orchestral concert in the world post-lockdown with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, followed by concerts with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s first season back in 2021. His leadership helped reopen concert halls and restore live music-making at a time of global uncertainty. During 2020–2021, Dane served as Resident Conductor and Associate Music Director of Opera Queensland — the first titled conductor in the company’s history.

Opera has always been central to his career. He has conducted more than thirty productions with companies including Opera Australia, Scottish Opera, Opera Queensland, West Australian Opera, Opera Holland Park, Shaan’xi Grand Theatre, and Hawai‘i Opera Theatre. He is especially in demand for his interpretations of Mozart, praised for their dramatic clarity and musical cohesion. His repertoire spans Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, Cilea, and Gluck, as well as contemporary composers such as Carl Davis and Will Todd. He is particularly admired for drawing emotionally detailed performances of the Italian repertoire from both singers and orchestras.

As a symphonic guest conductor, Dane has led orchestras across Europe, Asia, and Australasia, including the Munich Radio Symphony, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, City of London Sinfonia, Residentie Orkest The Hague, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, and the Verbier Festival Orchestra. In the Asia-Pacific region, he has conducted the symphony orchestras of Shenzhen, Beijing, Suzhou, Kunming, and Dunedin, as well as all major Australian state orchestras. His Beethoven performances are noted for their immediacy and visceral energy, and in Hawai‘i he is currently leading a multi-year Mahler Cycle, bringing out the vivid modernity and emotional range of that composer’s sound world.

After undergraduate studies at the University of Queensland, Dane studied conducting at The Juilliard School under James DePreist and later at the Royal Northern College of Music with Sir Mark Elder. He was assistant to Kurt Masur at the Orchestre National de France and a protégé of Gianluigi Gelmetti, under whose mentorship he worked during the maestro’s tenures at the Sydney Symphony and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

Whether conducting Mahler or Mozart, in Waikīkī, Xi’an, or Adelaide, Dane Lam does more than conduct concerts — he builds bridges: between cultures and communities, between artists and audiences, and between what music has been and what it still can be today.

Nico Muhly, born in 1981, is an American composer who writes orchestral music, works for the stage, choral music, chamber music and sacred music. He’s received commissions from The Metropolitan Opera: Two Boys (2011), and Marnie (2018); Carnegie Hall, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and Wigmore Hall; his
choral music, both sacred and secular, has been performed by The Tallis Scholars and the choirs of Westminster Abbey, Southwark Cathedral, King’s College Cambridge, St John’s College Cambridge, Magdalen College, Oxford and Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, where he is composer-in-residence. He has been featured at the Barbican, King’s Place and the Philharmonie de Paris as composer, conductor, pianist, and curator. An avid collaborator, he has worked with choreographers Benjamin Millepied at the Paris Opéra Ballet, Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham at New York City Ballet, and Mark Morris; artists Sufjan Stevens, The National, Teitur, Anohni, James Blake and Paul Simon. His work for screen includes scores for The Reader (2008) and Kill Your Darlings (2013), the BBC’s adaptation of Howards End (2017) and Pachinko for Apple TV+ (2022-2024).

Among his concerti are works for violin and strings, (Shrink, for Pekka Kuusisto), organ (Register, for James McVinnie), viola (for Nadia Sirota), two pianos (In Certain Circles, for Katia and Marielle Labèque), piano (for Alexandre Tharaud), violin (for Renaud Capuçon), a Concerto Grosso (flute, trombone, cello & percussion, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic), and trumpet (Doom Painting for
Tine Thing Helseth); his vocal collaborators include Iestyn Davies, Renée Fleming, and Nicholas Phan. Recent large-scale solo works include The Street, a collaboration with librettist Alice Goodman for harpist Parker Ramsay, and The Bell Études, for pianist Conor Hanick. He has worked with visual artists Maira Kalman, Yu Hong, and Oliver Beer, and has created site-reactive works for the National Gallery, London, the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Initiative at the Venice Biennale, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and written articles for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the London Review of Books. Recordings of his works have been released by Decca and Nonesuch, and he is part of the artist-run record label Bedroom Community, which released his first two albums, Speaks Volumes (2006) and Mothertongue (2008).