Nicholas Cords

About Nicholas

For more than two decades, omnivorous violist Nicholas Cords has been on the front line of a growing constellation of projects as performer, educator, and cultural advocate. A founding member of Brooklyn Rider, newly appointed Co-Artistic director of Silkroad, and viola faculty at New England Conservatory, he is deeply committed to music from a broad variety of traditions and epochs, with a particular passion for the cross section between the long tradition of classical music and the polyglot music of today.

Mr. Cords serves as violist, Programming Chair, and Co-Artistic director of Silkroad, a musical collective founded by Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 with the simple belief that radical cross-cultural collaboration leads to a more hopeful world. This mission is poignantly explored by the recent Oscar nominated documentary by Morgan Neville, The Music Of Strangers, which profiles the individual stories of Ensemble members and makes a case for why culture matters in today’s world.

In recent years, Mr. Cords has served as Silkroad Programming Chair, taking an active role presenting the Ensemble in the world’s major musical centers and in the context museum residencies (American Museum of Natural History, Freer-Sackler Museum) and educational work (including a longstanding residency at Harvard University). He has also been deeply involved in bringing to life more than a hundred compositions and arrangements over the group’s relatively short history. Mr. Cords appears on all of the Silkroad Ensemble’s albums including Sing Me Home (Sony Music),which received a 2017 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album. Other albums include Silk Road Journeys, Beyond the Horizon, New Impossibilities, Off the Map, and A Playlist a Without Borders. Most recently, the group is prominently featured in the soundtrack for Ken Burns’ searing ten-part documentary on the Vietnam War, with an accompanying release available on In A Circle Records.

Mr. Cords is a founding member of Brooklyn Rider, an intrepid string quartet which NPR credits with “recreating the 300-year-old form of string quartet as a vital and creative 21st-century ensemble.” In a short amount of time, Brooklyn Rider’s singular mission and gripping performance style have resulted in an indelible contribution to the world of the string quartet and has brought in legions of fans across the spectrum. Highly committed to collaborative ventures, the group has worked with Irish fiddler Martin Hayes, jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman, ballerina Wendy Whelan, Persian kemancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, banjoist Béla Fleck, and Mexican songstress Magos Herrera to name a few. Brooklyn Rider regularly commissions and champions new works, including those by Tyondai Braxton, Gabriel Kahane, John Luther Adams, Caroline Shaw, Evan Ziporyn, plus many more. Notable appearances in recent seasons include those at Lincoln Center‘s White Light Festival, Opernhouse Zürich, A Prairie Home Companion, and the South By Southwest Festival. Their recordings, Silent City, Passport, Dominant Curve, Brooklyn Rider Plays Philip Glass, Seven Steps, A Walking Fire, The Brooklyn Rider Almanac, Spontaneous Symbols, and Dreamers, have received wide critical acclaim from sources ranging from Gramophone Magazine to Pitchfork.

As a soloist, he has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Bridgeport Symphony. Recent highlights include performances at the White Nights Festival in St. Petersburg in works ranging from Feldman to Wuorinen and the Vail International Dance Festival, where he participated in a revival of a long dormant late Balanchine choreography set to Stravinsky’s Élegie for solo viola with the great Brazilian ballerina Carla Körbes. His highly acclaimed 2013 debut solo album, Recursions (In A Circle Records), features works ranging from Biber to Hindemith to Cords’ own Five Migrations. Nicholas has appeared frequently over the years on television and radio including a Chinese National Television broadcast from the Great Wall, the David Letterman Show, numerous National Public Radio broadcasts, Good Morning America, NHK Japan, and a four year run as resident commentator and performer on WQXR New York’s Radio weekly On A-I-R. In addition, he has worked with many ensembles, including the Knights, the Caramoor Virtuousi, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, An Die Musik, and the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert.

Mr. Cords began his musical education at the Juilliard School where he won top honors in the viola competition and subsequently gave the New York premiere of John Harbison’s Viola Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall. He completed his studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. His teachers and mentors have included Karen Tuttle, Harvey Shapiro, Joseph Fuchs, and Felix Galamir. A committed teacher, Mr. Cords taught for seven years at Stony Brook University in New York and currently makes his home in Boston where he teaches at New England Conservatory. Mr. Cords recently participated as a jury member for the prestigious ARD Competition (Viola Category) in Munich this past September. Mr. Cords plays on an instrument made for him in 2014 by famed Brooklyn maker Samuel Zygmuntowicz, modeled on the ex-William Primrose Giuseppe Guarneri (filius Andrea) from 1697. He performs on bows from a wide variety of the world’s top modern makers including Charles Espey, Benoit Rolland, and others.