Nicholas Phan & Brooklyn Rider

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 four-movement work 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 anglaise sits alongside Schubert’s stormy Death and the Maiden quartet, a longtime mainstay of the chamber music repertoire.

Wainwright, Trois valses anglaises (arr. Rob Moose) (Boston premiere)
Nico Muhly, “Stranger” (Boston premiere)

Schubert, String Quartet in D minor “Death and the Maiden” with voice (arr. Osvaldo Golijov)

This performance also has a streaming option November 12-18, 2021:
https://www.celebrityseries.org/productions/digital-phan-brooklyn-rider/