Going alt-classical with Brooklyn Rider

A man walked into a bar, and a string quartet was playing … There's no punchline, because this is no joke.

Since the advent of mass-marketed recorded music, classical musicians have sought to "cross over" into popular styles, whether it's opera superstar Renee Fleming making a rock album or the Kronos Quartet recording "Purple Haze." But as the sales of recorded music have shifted from pre-packaged to mix-and-match, there's a new avenue open to classical musicians to reach a broader - and younger - audience. The country is dotted with nightclubs presenting classical ensembles that perform a little chamber music, a little jazz, some world music and … you name it.

Enter Brooklyn Rider: With a name that sounds alt-country, this string quartet stands firmly at the center of alt-classical.

The foursome plays Debussy, Schubert and Beethoven - and everything from Persian roots music to a Finnish tango - in clubs like Joe's Pub in New York, and it has the singular distinction of being the first classical group to perform at SXSW, the annual indie rock blowout in Austin, Texas.

This sounds like a garage band, but the quartet is firmly grounded in the traditional repertoire. It will be featured this weekend at a pair of Musical Masterworks concerts, and violist Nicholas Cords took time between concerts in southern California last week to describe the quartet's evolution and the upcoming Old Lyme program.

Reflecting on the 2010 club date at SXSW, Cords says, "It's not every day you get to play in a packed, standing-room-only environment, with people standing shoulder-to-shoulder. It says a lot about how people listen to music now. People are quite open. We don't want to pander to that, it's just the way that we listen to music, too."

Members of the quartet - violist Cords, cellist Eric Jacobsen and violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen - have performed together in various groupings (including the obvious fraternal pairing of the Jacobsen brothers) since their days at The Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute. All four had participated in Yo-Yo Ma's musical movable feast, The Silk Road Ensemble, where they embraced sounds and scores from other cultures and cemented this musical affinity. Eclectic fare that tilts toward the Far and Near East, and includes collaborations with musicians such as a virtuoso on the Persian fiddle called a "kamancheh," is prominent in their set list. (Underscoring the two worlds in which Brooklyn Rider performs, Cords slips back and forth between the term "set list" and "program" as he speaks.)

After a few years boxing the compass of 21st century world music, Brooklyn Rider's newest creative project is to tackle one particularly edgy, genre-defying score. At Masterworks, the quartet will perform it: Beethoven's String Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131.

"Late Beethoven is always going to sound contemporary, as if it's being heard for the first time," Cords says. "Too many people think of this as music on a pedestal, so you really can't touch it and feel it. But one of our joys of preparing this piece was to really approach it from the ground up."

The six late Beethoven quartets are surrounded by a mythic haze. They were written after a prolonged period of retreat from composition by Beethoven, a time when the composer was deeply troubled and quite deaf. Romantics looked upon them as a message from the other side, the gift from a musical Orpheus who ventured into the unknown to bring back an otherworldly offering.

It is axiomatic to call Opus 131 "the greatest string quartet," but it certainly is one of the most unusual. It opens, strangely enough, with a melancholic fugue, which Wagner called "surely the saddest thing ever expressed in notes," and traverses seven movements without pause, in what Cords describes as "one of the ultimate motivic journeys in all classical music."

By tackling Opus 131, Brooklyn Rider started at the top - it's the first Beethoven quartet they've added to their repertoire, and it's their latest recording project. In an online video, part of the quartet's self-funding pitch on kickstarter.com, violinist Johnny Gandelsman says, "Many people would say 131 is the greatest, and we just wanted to go for the best."

(Hear them discuss Opus 131 here.)

And, oddly enough, this will be the first of the late Beethoven quartets to be performed at Masterworks in its more than two decades here. And, in one of the ironies of alt-classical versus the staid-tried-and-true, Brooklyn Rider is having its own Beethoven moment: Much like Beethoven himself, who would respond to Mozart by writing sets of quartets in the same keys as Mozart, Brooklyn Rider has responded to Opus 131 with its own composition.

Cords says the long process of working through the seven movements of Opus 131 led to members expanding on an idea, riffing on a phrase, conceiving what would be the next step, or an alternative path, in the musical journey.

"It eventually grew into a group composition," he says, and the CD-in-progress bears the works' name: "Seven Steps."

In writing of the group composition, Cord said, "We certainly don't intend for our piece to rise to the same transcendent heights as Beethoven, but what is extremely important to us is to constantly push our boundaries outwards. Being closer to the creative process ourselves not only results in the creation of new music, but also helps us to achieve more empathetic interpretations of other people's music."

Cords writes for a blog for the excellent NPR Music site called "Deceptive Cadence," and Brooklyn Rider has been a favorite there since before they even had a name. It was NPR that sponsored and broadcast the SWSX gig, and it invited them in for one of their online Tiny Desk Concerts (listen here).

In Old Lyme, the quartet will be joined by Masterworks Artistic Director Edward Arron on cello to perform the unusual Boccherini String Quintet in E Major, G. 288.

"It was the ultimate experimental music of its time," Cords says. "There are moments when it's all about texture."

And they will reach back deeper, into the 17th century for Purcell's Fantasia Upon One Note for Five Instruments. Then they end with a 21st century composition by Colin Jacobsen that Cords describes as partly Dvorák and partly bluegrass.

The program arcs across more than three centuries of music. Reflecting on Opus 131, Cords says, "Beethoven didn't write string quartets in a Beethoven bubble. He was responding to the music passing under his window."

So too does Brooklyn Rider, but in this Internet age, that window is so much bigger.

Musical Masterworks, 5 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday, First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Ferry Road, Old Lyme; $35, $5 for students; (860) 434-2252, musicalmasterworks.org.