Akropolis Reed Quintet

Sunday November 19, 2023 | 3:00pm

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Masterworks

Over its 15-year history, Akropolis has created future masterworks from scratch while reimagining several existing, significant works from the classical canon. This program presents four of these works in two pairs, connecting them with threads spanning 100 years of musical history.


When Maurice Ravel composed Le Tombeau de Couperin, jazz was washing over the parlors and salons of France, Europe, and all the Western world. 100 years later, Omar Thomas’ Moods and Attitudes nearly creates a new genre in and of itself, fusing bebop and blues with Akropolis’ tour de force technical mastery. The second pairing compares a new work by West African-inspired composer Derrick Skye with George Gershwin’s seminal An American in Paris.

PROGRAM


Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin arr. Raaf Hekkema

Omar Thomas: Moods and Attitudes


– INTERMISSION –


Derrick Skye: Title TBD commissioned with support of the
Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Fund


George Gershwin: An American in Paris


Program subject to change

  • Akropolis Reed Quintet Biography

    Celebrating their 13th year making music with a “collective voice driven by real excitement and a sense of adventure” (The Wire), Akropolis has “taken the chamber music world by storm” (Fanfare). As the first reed quintet to grace the Billboard Charts (May 2021), the untamed band of 5 reed players and entrepreneurs are united by a shared passion: to make music that sparks joy and wonder. 


    Winner of 7 national chamber music prizes including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal, Akropolis delivers 120 concerts and educational events each year and has premiered over 130 works. They are the first ensemble of their kind to grace the stage on noteworthy series like Oneppo (Yale University), Chamber Music San Antonio, Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.), Summerwinds Münster (Germany), Flagler Museum (Palm Beach), and many more. 


    “There’s nothing tentative in [Akropolis’] approach, and that extends to their programming of multifariously challenging and imaginative new works” (The Wire). Currently, Akropolis is collaborating with GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman on their Are We Dreaming the Same Dream? the project, an album and a touring program drawing classical and jazz idioms together to reflect on American identity.


    Akropolis’ 22-23 season will include premieres of the music of Augusta Read Thomas and Omar Thomas; imaginative renditions of music by Ravel, Bernstein, Rameau, Shostakovich, and Gershwin; and touring their 4th album, Ghost Light, lauded for its “range, agility, and grace” (The Whole Note).


    Winner of the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award and a nonprofit organization which has received 5 consecutive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Akropolis runs a festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and an annual, yearlong residency at three public Detroit high schools. 


    The “pure gold” (San Francisco Chronicle) Akropolis Reed Quintet performs worldwide and is represented exclusively by Ariel Artists. 

  • Program Notes

    About his famous Le Tombeau de Couperin and why the composer wrote uplifting music to memorialize his friends lost during the First World War, Ravel stated, “The dead are sad enough, in their eternal silence.” Inspired by Ravel’s courage and facing a modern world changing so quickly, Akropolis provides an opportunity to remember, tribute, and memorialize things we have lost and acknowledge loss for its pain and beauty. 


    Accompanying an arrangement of Le Tombeau by Raaf Hekkema of the Dutch reed Quintet, Calefax, Akropolis tributes the funk, gospel, blues, struts, and church collections of Harlem through an equally upbeat series of vignettes by Harlem native Arthur Cunningham, entitled, Harlem Suite. Akropolis commissions by composers Stacy Garrop of Chicago and Jeff Scott (also a Harlem native), which highlight their Billboard charting 4th album, Ghost Light, bring forth the dead for consideration in two works which celebrate the ghosts and spirits of our past and our present—Rites for the Afterlife, a 4-movement work walking the listener through the harrowing journey of the soul in Egyptian afterlife, and Homage to Paradise Valley, honouring Detroit’s lost Black neighbourhoods of the early 1900s.

All of the music is remarkable for the sheer joy that it elicits from the exceptional ARQ musicians Blend, balance, unanimity of pitch and phrasing: all are perfect. The quintet plays with imagination, infallible musicality, and huge vitality.


- Ronald E. Grames, Fanfare Magazine

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