The Knights are a fellowship of adventurous musicians who cultivate collaborative music making and who creatively engage audiences in the shared joy of musical performance. Based in New York City, The Knights expand the orchestral concert experience with their diverse programming, innovative formats, and unique atmosphere of camaraderie that creates the intimacy and immediacy of chamber music. Led
by conductor Eric Jacobsen, The Knights perform in a wide spectrum of concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Tonic, the Brooklyn Lyceum, Le Poisson Rouge, Celebrate Brooklyn, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Central Park, Mass MoCA, and the Whitney Museum. Also in demand on the international stage, they have appeared at the Dresden Musikfestspiele, the National Gallery in Dublin, and Berlin's Radialsystem. Their expanding presence on the music festival scene includes performances at the Ravinia Festival, the International Beethovenfest in Bonn, and at the Caramoor Fall Festival with Yo-Yo Ma. The chamber orchestra's extensive repertoire features traditional and contemporary masterworks of classical, popular, and world music in collaboration with leading artists including sopranos Dawn Upshaw and Susan Narucki, violinist Gil Shaham, flutist Paula Robison, singer-songwriter (and Knights violinist) Christina Courtin, Iranian ney (Persian bamboo flute) virtuoso Siamak Jahangiri, pianist Steven Beck, fiddler Mark O'Connor, Syrian clarinetist/composer Kinan Azmeh, and cellist Jan Vogler. Dedicated to the music of our time, The Knights have served as the resident chamber orchestra of the MATA Festival for young composers, premiering new works by Christopher Tignor and Prix-de-Rome winner Yotam Haber. The ensemble has worked closely with composer Osvaldo Golijov, performing his Passion According to St. In a unique site-specific song-cycle with text based on conversation overheard in transient public spaces, The Knights and soprano Susan Narucki have taken audiences on a journey through composer Lisa Bielawa's Chance Encounter at Seward Park in New York's Lower East Side, at the Whitney Museum, and in a recording for Philip Glass's Orange Mountain Music label. Another creative collaboration took place in 2008 when Celebrate Brooklyn presented The Knights as the silent-film orchestra for Charlie Chaplin movies with original scores by UK-based composer Carl Davis for an audience of thousands. Members of The Knights are graduates of the Juilliard, Curtis, Manhattan, Mannes, and Eastman music schools. As soloists, members have performed with the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Israel Philharmonic, and Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart orchestra. Equally successful as chamber and orchestral musicians, they participate in the world's most prestigious music festivals, including Marlboro, Tanglewood, Verbier, Stillwater, Lucerne, Salzburg, and Moritzburg, and perform with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. Many members of The Knights bring talents that go beyond traditional orchestral skills; there are composers, arrangers, singer-songwriters, and improvisers who bring a range of cultural influences to the group from jazz and klezmer genres to pop and indie rock music. The Knights recently recorded two albums for SONY Classical. The first project featured internationally recognized cellist Jan Vogler in the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1 from a live recording at New York's cutting-edge concert venue, Le Poisson Rouge. Also on the album are arrangements of Shostakovich waltzes and the Jimi Hendrix song "Machine Gun." Their second album, "New Worlds," features works by Copland, Dvorak, Ives, Gabriela Lena Frank, and Osvaldo Golijov. The Knights have also joined Lara and Scott St. John for a Mozart concerti album on the Ancalagon label. The orchestra's first solo record featuring the music of Schubert, Glass, Satie and Feldman will be released by Ancalagon later this year.
