Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

6:45-7:30 in the Krasnoff Theater: Arts Insider with staff from Silkroad Ensemble. Free for all ticket holders!
 

Rhiannon Giddens, banjo, voice

Shawn Conley, bass
Sandeep Das, tabla
Haruka Fujii, marimba, percussion
Maeve Gilchrist, harp
Karen Ouzounian, cello
Mazz Swift, violin, voice
Niwel Tsumbu, guitar
Francesco Turrisi, frame drums, accordion
Mauro Durante, percussion*
Mehdi Nassouli, guembri*

About the Program 
The Silkroad Ensemble’s latest flagship program with Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens is Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual. The program explores humanity’s enduring impulse to turn to music in moments of upheaval, grief, and transformation. Across cultures and throughout history, communal sound-making has served as a refuge and a way to process loss, forge connection, and restore balance in times of uncertainty. In Sanctuary, Silkroad invites audiences into this shared space, examining how ritual, trance, and resonance function not only as musical practices, but as deeply human responses to the challenges of living together in an unsettled world.

Drawing from a vast range of global traditions, including Southern Italian tarantella, Moroccan Gnawa, Indian classical music, Japanese farmers’ song, and American folk practices, the program highlights music’s ability to create presence, grounding, and collective meaning.

Rather than presenting these traditions in isolation, Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual weaves them into an ongoing dialogue, revealing unexpected connections across geography and history. The result is an evocative experience in which listeners are invited to participate as witnesses and partners in the act of listening itself.

At the heart of Sanctuary is a deeply collaborative creative process rooted in improvisation and shared musical storytelling. Each artist brings their own cultural lineage and lived musical language into the room, offering it as both a personal expression and a communal invitation. Through attentive listening and trust, the ensemble allows one another to “sit” within these traditions, learning, responding, and building new music together in real time, while honoring the integrity of each voice.

This program also marks the first appearance of guest artists Mehdi Nassouli and Mauro Durante, whose musical lineages bring powerful expressions of trance and communal rhythm into conversation with Silkroad’s core ensemble. Through spontaneous collaboration, layered grooves, and moments of quiet reflection, the musicians explore how repetition, pulse, and resonance can open pathways to healing and shared understanding.

At once intimate and expansive, Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual is not a retreat from the world in a time of unrest, but a response to it, offering music as a space of refuge, renewal, and connection. In a time when division and dissonance often dominate, Silkroad reminds us of music’s capacity to hold complexity, honor tradition, and create moments of collective stillness and joy.

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).