The Knights are a collective of adventurous musicians dedicated to transforming the orchestral experience and eliminating barriers between audiences and music. Driven by an open-minded spirit of camaraderie and exploration, they inspire listeners with vibrant programs rooted in the classical tradition and passion for artistic discovery. The Knights started with late-night chamber music reading parties with friends at the home of violinist Colin Jacobsen and cellist Eric Jacobsen. The Jacobsen brothers serve as artistic directors of The Knights, with Eric Jacobsen as conductor.

Proud to be known as “one of Brooklyn’s sterling cultural products ... known far beyond the borough for their relaxed virtuosity and expansive repertory” (The New Yorker), The Knights have toured extensively across the US and Europe since their founding in 2007. They are celebrated globally, appearing on the world’s most prestigious stages, including those at Tanglewood, Ravinia Festival, Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Musikverein, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. The orchestra has collaborated with many renowned soloists including Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Béla Fleck, and Gil Shaham.

After last season’s 11-stop European tour with violinist Ray Chen, The Knights look forward to making music closer to home in the 2023–2024 season. The season features a performance for the Circle Songs celebration at the newly completed Perelman Performing Arts Center and a three-concert series presented by Carnegie Hall that features new works commissioned as part of the Rhapsody project, a multi-year initiative inspired by the 2024 centennial of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The Knights’ upcoming Carnegie Hall concerts feature Wu Man, Magos Herrera, Jeffrey Kahane, and other esteemed collaborators. For the orchestra’s complete schedule and a list of artistic partners and collaborative projects, please visit theknightsnyc.com.

Violinist and composer Colin Jacobsen is “one of the most interesting figures on the classical music scene” (Washington Post). Since the early 2000s, he has forged an intriguing path in the cultural landscape of our time, collaborating with an astonishingly wide range of artists across diverse traditions and disciplines while constantly looking for new ways to connect with audiences. For his work as a founding member of two innovative and influential ensembles—the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and orchestra The Knights—he was selected from among the nation’s top visual, performing, media, and literary artists to receive a prestigious and substantial United States Artists Fellowship. He is also active as an Avery Fisher Career Grant–winning soloist and has toured with Silkroad since its founding by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000 at Tanglewood. As a composer, he has written pieces for an eclectic mix of artists that include pianist Emanuel Ax, singers Anne Sofie von Otter and Jamie Barton, banjo-player Béla Fleck, mandolinist Avi Avital, clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, choreographers John Heginbotham and Brian Brooks, and theater group Compagnia de’ Colombari and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. In the 2022–2023 season, Mr. Jacobsen assumed the position of artistic director at Santa Fe Pro Musica, an organization with which he has had a fruitful long-term association as a guest soloist and leader.

Already well established as one of classical music’s most exciting and innovative young conductors, Eric Jacobsen combines fresh interpretations of the traditional canon with cutting-edge collaborations across musical genres. Hailed by The New York Times as “an interpretive dynamo,” Mr. Jacobsen, as both a conductor and a cellist, has built a reputation for engaging audiences with innovative and collaborative programming.

Mr. Jacobsen joined the Virginia Symphony Orchestra as music director in 2021 as the 12th music director in the orchestra’s more than 100-year history. Current projects include a recording of works by Dvořák and Coleridge-Taylor with violinist Gil Shaham and Rhapsody in Blue (on banjo!) with Béla Fleck.

Mr. Jacobsen is in his ninth season as music director of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, and he continues to pioneer the orchestra’s programming and community engagement in new and exciting directions. The 2023–2024 season looks forward to the return of the Resonate Festival, a unique blend of old and new orchestral and chamber works performed in standard and more intimate concert formats.

Mr. Jacobsen is also artistic director and co-founder of The Knights, the uniquely adventurous New York City–based chamber orchestra. The ensemble, founded with his brother, violinist Colin Jacobsen, grew out of late-night, music-reading parties with friends, good food and drink, and conversation. Current initiatives include a multi-year Rhapsody project as well as a residency at Carnegie Hall. Under Mr. Jacobsen’s baton, The Knights have developed an extensive recording collection, which includes the critically acclaimed album Azul with longtime collaborator Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a recent album featuring Gil Shaham in performances of the Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos.

A frequent guest conductor, Mr. Jacobsen has established continuing relationships with the Colorado Symphony, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Bach Festival, and Dresden Musikfestspiele. Recent engagements also include concerts with the Omaha Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Grant Park Music Festival.

Mr. Jacobsen brings joy, storytelling, and a touch of humor to what he describes as “musical conversations” that delight audiences around the world, including those who do not traditionally attend classical music concerts. He is married to Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Aoife O’Donovan, and they have a daughter.

MacArthur Fellow and Grammy Award–winning mandolinist, singer, and songwriter Chris Thile, who the Guardian calls “that rare being: an all-round musician who can settle into any style, from bluegrass to classical,” and NPR calls a “genre-defying musical genius,” is a founding member of the critically acclaimed bands Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek. For four years, Mr. Thile hosted public radio favorite Live from Here with Chris Thile (formerly known as A Prairie Home Companion). With his broad outlook, he creates a distinctly American canon and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike, giving the listener “one joyous arc, with the linear melody and vertical harmony blurring into a single web of gossamer beauty” (The New York Times).

Mr. Thile released the album Laysongs in 2021 on Nonesuch. It is his first truly solo album: just him, his voice, and his mandolin on new recordings of six original songs and three covers, all of which contextualize and banter with his ideas about spirituality. Recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic, the centerpiece of Laysongs is the three-part “Salt (in the Wounds) of the Earth,” which was inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. The album also features a song Mr. Thile wrote about Dionysus; a performance of the fourth movement of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin; “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot,” based on Buffy Sainte-Marie’s adaptation of a Leonard Cohen poem; a cover of bluegrass legend Hazel Dickens’s “Won’t You Come and Sing for Me”; and “Ecclesiastes 2:24,” an original instrumental loosely modeled after the Prelude from J. S. Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major, BWV 1006.