Silk Road Ensemble Artists

Nicholas Cords
viola (b. 1974, United States)

Violist Nicholas Cords is strongly committed to the advocacy and performance of music from a very broad historical 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 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 and Charlottesville festivals.

Mr. Cords is a regular member of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, which has traveled not only to many of the major musical centers of the United States and Europe, but also to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Egypt, Iran, Syria and a number of the Central Asian Republics. In addition to performing with the Ensemble, Mr. Cords has had a role in organizing and developing new creative projects and programming for concerts and museum residencies, as well as an active role in two long-term university residencies, one at 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: When Strangers Meet, Beyond the Horizon and New Impossibilities.

He has appeared frequently 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 and an NHK Japan documentary; he has also had a four-year run as resident commentator and performer on WQXR New York’s Radio weekly On A-I-R. Mr. Cords is an active member of many ensembles, including the Caramoor Virtuousi, An Die Musik, Richardson Chamber Players, and the Metropolitan Museum Artists in Concert. He is also part of a string quartet named Brooklyn Rider that, in addition to a wide array of activities, helped to found the Stillwater Music Festival. 

Mr. Cords began his musical education at the Juilliard School where he won top honors in the viola competition, and he 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 have included Karen Tuttle, Harvey Shapiro, Joseph Fuchs, and Felix Galamir. Himself a committed teacher, Mr. Cords spends part of his summer schedule teaching at the Bennington Chamber Music and Composers Conference and during the year serves as viola instructor at Princeton University. He has twice participated as a mentor along with other members of the Silk Road Ensemble in Weill Institute Professional Training Workshops at Carnegie Hall and has also delivered a series of teacher workshops for the New York City Department of Education on music and the role of it can play in cross-cultural understanding. Mr. Cords plays on an instrument made for him in 2004 by famed Brooklyn maker Samuel Zygmuntowicz.