Brooklyn Rider - The String Quartets of Philip Glass

Brooklyn Rider are playing the Sohmen Concert Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities on Sunday 31 January 2027, starting at 19:00. The New York string quartet is bringing over a programme they call Temples of Resonance, which puts six of Philip Glass's string quartets together in one evening.

It's a substantial set. They'll be playing String Quartet no. 7, String Quartet no. 2 'Company', String Quartet no. 5, Quartet Satz, String Quartet no. 4 'Buczak', and String Quartet no. 3 'Mishima'. Those six pieces were written over more than three decades, from 1985 to 2017, so the concert works as a bit of a retrospective. The idea is to trace how Glass's style evolved across that time, and to hear the things that run through it all: the intricate patterns, the rich harmonies, and those drone-like textures that have come to define his musical language. There's also a connection to Schubert woven in.

The whole thing marks Philip Glass's 90th birthday, so it's a celebratory occasion as much as a survey of his work. Having six quartets in one sitting gives you a proper sense of the scale of his output for strings, rather than just a few highlights plucked out of context. It's a long evening of music, but that's the point — you get to hear the shift in his writing from the mid-eighties through to the late 2010s.

Brooklyn Rider are a New York-based string quartet, and this is one of their programmes. The concert is at the Sohmen Concert Hall, part of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter on Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG. It starts at 19:00 on Sunday 31 January 2027.