Stranger

The Knights are featured on Nicholas Phan’s GRAMMY-nominated album “Stranger,” comprising world premiere recordings of three of the composer’s major works: Impossible Things for tenor, solo violin and orchestra; Lorne Ys My Likinge for countertenor, tenor and piano; and Stranger for tenor and string quartet.

Learn more and stream the album HERE

About the Album

A song cycle exploring the American immigrant experience, the title work was expressly written for Phan, who gave its acclaimed world premiere performance two years ago with Brooklyn Rider in January 2020 as part of his Emerging Voices project at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. For Stranger, Muhly juxtaposes settings of accounts of immigration through Ellis Island with those of texts protesting the United States’ Chinese Exclusion policies of the late-19th century. Phan describes his encounters with Muhly’s music as being both “artistically and personally transformative,” and recalls the Stranger’s premiere as the first time he felt his identity had been respectfully represented in a work classical music.

In Impossible Things, Muhly took his text from the work of Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, in a translation by Daniel Mendelsohn. Phan gave its U.S. premiere with Colin and Eric Jacobsen and The Knights at the 2016 NY Philharmonic Biennial. Again drawing inspiration from Britten, this time from the English composer’s Canticle II: “Abraham and Isaac,” Muhly’s Lorne Ys My Likinge is a setting of a Chester Mystery play, a cycle of 15th-century biblical dramas. This relates the story of the three Marys – Mary Magdalene, Mary Jacobi and Mary Salome – who arrive at the tomb of Christ, only to be greeted by two angels who tell them of Jesus’s resurrection.