Kickin’ It Old School: Brooklyn Rider’s 7 Steps
The versatile Brooklyn Rider String Quartet is one of a number of chamber groups seeking to take the classical tradition out of its well-worn ruts, give it a fresh perspective, infuse it with the new and emerging, and bring it to new audiences. Its latest endeavor in that regard is something seemingly counter-intuitive: recording Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, Op. 131. This makes Seven Steps, its latest album on In a Circle Records, something truly substantive and free for the most part of the gimmickry and low-quality “crossover” that mires too many contemporary classical recordings. The album also features a collective composition / improvisation by Brooklyn Rider called Seven Steps, as well as Together Into This Unknowable Night, a piece for string quartet and electronics by NYC-based composer Christopher Tignor.
Brooklyn Rider – Photograph by Sarah Small
As this season was drawing to an end, the Metropolitan Museum was announcing the next, a couple of weeks ago, in the beautiful Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Curated by Limor Tomer, this new season will feature some edgy shows, some new music performed on historical instruments from the Sau Wing Lam Collection, and a year-long partnership with Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.
The small audience who braved a rare San Francisco thunderstorm to get to Redshift’s concert on April 12 was rewarded for their trip by an evening filled with mostly minimalist-influenced music, wine, and cookies. 
Classical guitar is a pain in the ass. The way you’re meant to sit: weird/humiliating. The disparity between left and right hand technique: completely frustrating. Reading guitar music at sight: laughably annoying. And, perhaps most maddening: trying to project to a point at which an audience can actually hear you once you get all those other things to jibe. Maybe these reasons are why the instrument is so often neglected in the realm of chamber music, and furthermore, maybe that’s why there’s such a preciously tiny handful of classical guitarists that have broken the boundary into composition and true musicianship – because so few of us have the facility to deal with our own instrument, let alone communicate with or through other ones. That is why seeing David Leisner perform alongside pianist and compadre Jon Klibonoff as part of Symphony Space’s Guitar Plus series marked, for me, a kind of breakthrough. Apart from Leisner’s amazing facility that showed the guitar can definitely hang with arguably the most important instrument in the history of western music, his original composition for piano solo proved that classical guitarists can be legitimate musical thinkers with the ability to range out of the cramped knot that is them and their instrument and into a world of sound and color that points towards totally new directions.
