Violist Nicholas Cords is strongly committed to the advocacy and performance of music from a very broad historic and geographical spectrum. His busy touring schedule has led him in recent years to Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw, Alice Tully Hall, the Cologne Philharmonie, and the Library of Congress. As a soloist, he has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, and with the New York String Seminar Orchestra. His chamber music credits include the Schleswig-Holstein, Santa Fe, Tanglewood, Piccolo Spoleto, Lincoln Center, Mostly Mozart, Ravinia, Smithsonian Folklife, Moritzburg, and Charlottesville festivals.
Mr. Cords is a regular member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, a musical collective that uses the historic Silk Road trading route as a metaphor for musical exchange and creativity in the present. The group has not only traveled to many of the major musical centers of the United States and Europe, but also to China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Egypt, Syria, Qatar and a number of the Central Asian Republics.
In addition to performing with the ensemble, he has taken a role in the organization and development of new creative projects, programming for concerts and museum residencies, and as an active part of two long-term residencies with the group; one at the Rhode Island School of Design and the other at Harvard University. Mr. Cords appears on all three of the ensemble’s albums released by Sony Classical; ‘Silk Road Journeys’, ‘Beyond the Horizon’, and ‘New Impossibilites’.