Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

About the Program 
The Silkroad Ensemble’s latest flagship program with Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens is Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual. In this program, Rhiannon and the Ensemble explore how we can experience music to better  understand our world, find comfort, process loss and a changing environment, and rebuild community based on our own humanity. Historically, when we have found ourselves in a time of conflict or stress, we have always turned to music—for example, many of us held on to our sanity during the long months of the pandemic with songs, sounds, and stories. 

The idea of trance, something that can bring us to a deep peace that is hard to find in modern society, is profoundly tied to the communal music-making traditions found in many different cultures, from Morocco to India to Ireland, and is a way in which we can build a stronger human connection amidst all the noise. In Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual, the musicians will delve deeply into one another’s music and traditions, such as Sicilian tarantella with Mauro Durante and Francesco Turrisi, Moroccan Gnawa with Mehdi Nassouli, Indian Classical music with Sandeep Das, American old-time with Rhiannon Giddens, and more, and invite audiences to join them as partners and participants in the performance, instead of solely as passive bystanders. 

For the first time ever, special guests Mehdi Nassouli and Mauro Durante will join the Silkroad Ensemble for this program. 

About the Silkroad Ensemble 
A Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble, Silkroad is a collective of artists representing dozens of nationalities, traditions and ideas, who use music and art to demonstrate how great beauty can emerge from great difference. The Ensemble strives to engage difference, sparking radical collaboration and music with a purpose, for a more hopeful and inclusive world. 

About Rhiannon Giddens 
Rhiannon Giddens has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A two-time Grammy Award-winning singer and multi-instrumentalist, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, Pulitzer Prize winner, and composer of opera, ballet, and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art. 

A founding member of the landmark Black string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, and the all-female banjo supergroup, Our Native Daughters, Giddens is as much a curator as a creator. She is the current Artistic Director of the Yo-Yo Ma-founded Silkroad Ensemble, hosts a TV show on PBS, My Music with Rhiannon Giddens, and has hosted two podcasts (Aria Code from New York City’s NPR affiliate station WQXR, which ran for three seasons, and American Railroad from Silkroad). Giddens has published two children's books and written and performed music for the soundtrack of Red Dead Redemption II, one of the best-selling video games of all time. She appeared as a recurring cast member on ABC's hit drama Nashville and as a music history expert on Ken Burns’ Country Music series on PBS. In 2025, she launched her own music festival in Durham, NC called Biscuits & Banjos, to celebrate Black culture outside the mainstream. 

As Pitchfork once said, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration”—a journey that has led to NPR naming her one of its 25 Most Influential Women Musicians of the 21st Century and to American Songwriter calling her “one of the most important musical minds currently walking the planet.” 

Her most recent album, a collaboration with Justin Robinson, is What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow (April 2025).