The name was a statement of intent. Eighteen years ago four young New Yorkers named their string quartet Brooklyn Rider, nodding to the eclecticism of Wassily Kandinsky’s pre-World War I Blue Rider artistic movement.

Since then, they’ve not only given exceptional performances from the 300-year-old quartet repertoire, but they’ve commissioned many new works and collaborated with major artists from inside and well outside the classical tradition, including saxophonist Joshua Redman and banjo virtuoso Bela Fleck. They have also recorded music by Kate Bush, Elvis Costello and Bjork with Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter.

This is not your traditional string quartet.

“Part of our mission has always been to try to find meaningful connection between that tradition and the [musical] world as a larger whole,” says violinist Colin Jacobsen. A common thread across their 20 albums has been “finding a framework for pieces that can speak to each other”. Often this involves taking quartets, whether by Debussy, Beethoven or Shostakovich, and recontextualising them by juxtaposing them with interrelated newly commissioned works.

Their Healing Modes album, for instance, centres on Beethoven’s Quartet No.15 in A minor, penned when he was desperately unwell. “Since it’s a five-movement work,” Jacobsen explains, “we asked five composers to write on the theme of healing and music, and they took it in very different directions. Some took it in a very societal direction, some were more about a personal illness and healing.” The result is like hearing the Beethoven anew.

Jacobsen recalls opera director Peter Sellars calling string quartets emblems of “radical democracy” – something the group now tempers. “In the first 10 years we made practically every decision collaboratively,” he says, “and it turns out that’s exhausting. Another form of democracy is passing the torch, and letting different people take the lead for different projects, and for different aspects of what it means to be in a quartet.”

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In this spirit, Jacobsen and Johnny Gandelsman swap the first and second violin roles, the quartet is completed by violist Nicholas Cords and cellist Michael Nicolas (the latter the only “new” member in 18 years). Jacobsen paraphrases a Cords observation that if you’re even thinking of joining a string quartet, you should already have a 95 per cent aesthetic overlap with the other members. “That last five per cent,” says Jacobsen, “is where all the work happens, and it’s certainly not easy work, but I think we enjoy that.”

The quartet’s stellar career has included being chosen by legendary American composer Philip Glass to record all his string quartets. “That was foundational,” says Jacobsen. “Philip Glass’s quartets are a bit of a Rosetta Stone for how to play in a quartet. They really focus you on the essentials of blend, sound production and texture.”