Name: Musicians from The Knights and Composer Paula Matthusen at MAXLive Festival
Start: 2023-11-11T19:30:00
Location: National Sawdust

The Knights

Experience the Carnegie season’s first performance by the intrepid chamber orchestra The Knights, led by artistic directors Eric Jacobsen and Colin Jacobsen. In an inspired new collaboration, they intersperse Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3—one of the composer’s most traditionally “classical” works—with original poetry by prizewinning poet and multidisciplinary artist J. Mae Barizo. Even in its original form, this would be Carnegie Hall’s first performance of Glass’s symphony—but in the hands of The Knights, it’s something no audience has heard before. In the program’s second half, The Knights perform a timeless orchestral staple: Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 4, a work of complex dualities and grand Romanticism.

The Knights at Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall

Driven by a “passion for musical discovery” and an “open-hearted spirit of camaraderie,” The Knights bring fresh excitement and insight to every performance. Tonight, conducted by Eric Jacobsen, they traverse a vast soundscape of American music as part of Carnegie Hall’s United in Sound: America at 250 festival. The program features Copland’s Pulitzer Prize–winning, folk-infused masterpiece: the Appalachian Spring Suite, plus the New York premiere of a concerto written by Gabriel Kahane for clarinetist extraordinaire Anthony McGill, part of the ensemble’s multi-year Rhapsody project.

The Knights at Carnegie Hall with Anthony McGill

Composer Paula Matthusen and musicians from The Knights unite for this world premiere event that celebrates birds as a timeless source of inspiration for humanity. Bringing together birdsong and music, making the whole world a sky rhapsodically joins these two worlds. Matthusen’s spellbinding new composition draws on recent and historical research from Cornell Ornithology, bringing recordings of birds’ songs and the technologies used to interact with them – including The Knights’ musical instruments – into a shared realm. What starts as a song may emerge as a space to be interrupted, negotiated, and savored.