Metropolis Ensemble

Metropolis Ensemble is a Grammy-recognized orchestral collective and nonprofit production house, founded in New York City in 2006 by conductor and producer Andrew Cyr. Dedicated to new music and the artists who make it, Metropolis has commissioned more than 450 new works and moves fluidly between worlds: Brooklyn Academy of Music's (BAM) Next Wave and Lincoln Center, the Hollywood Bowl and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Steel and Tanglewood, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and NBC's Tonight Show.

In a landmark year of national and international recognition, NPR Music named the ensemble's recording of Simeon ten Holt's Canto Ostinato—with Erik Hall and Sandbox Percussion—to its “Best Albums of 2026 (So Far),” the only new-music album on the list. Sarah Kirkland Snider's Forward into Light, released on Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, was named a finalist for Germany's 2026 Opus Klassik. And the New York Times selected Metropolis's production of Christopher Cerrone's In a Grove at PROTOTYPE Festival among its Best Classical Performances of 2025.

These honors join a deep record of acclaim, including three Grammy recognitions. Vivian Fung's Juno Award-winning Violin Concerto was commissioned, premiered, and recorded by Metropolis. Its catalog spans Nonesuch, New Amsterdam, Naxos, Merge, Western Vinyl, and Def Jam, with artists and composers including Avner Dorman, Timo Andres, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Tyondai Braxton, Questlove and The Roots, Wye Oak, Molly Joyce, William Brittelle, Emily Wells, and Vivian Fung. Metropolis has developed and performed major interdisciplinary works including David Bruce and Glyn Maxwell's The Firework-Maker's Daughter at New Victory Theater and Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia, which premiered at BAM's Next Wave and toured three continents.

At the heart of the organization is Rivington, its intimate Lower East Side home—a living laboratory where artists develop and premiere new work in its earliest, most adventurous forms, and where audiences encounter it free or pay-what-you-wish. Cyr's collaborative approach as artistic director centers on working closely with artists to discover the most ambitious form of an idea, then assembling the artistic forces and conditions that allow it to become real. That approach extends to long-term projects like William Brittelle's Eternal September, an expansive alternate digital reality developed with Metropolis as a founding partner alongside Brown Arts Institute and other leading cultural institutions.

Alongside civic-scale programs like the annual Biophony Solstice at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the citywide Biophony Pop-Up festival, Metropolis brings world-class new music to tens of thousands of New Yorkers each year—building, above all, a community where artists can take the risks that matter most.