Mission Statement
More than an Orchestra, Post-Classical Ensemble performs music in the context of its cultural heritage, including folk song, dance, film, and contemporary popular music, in order to serve existing audiences hungry for deeper engagement and to cultivate broader and younger audiences.
Description
Called by The Washington Post "a welcome, edgy addition to the musical life of Washington," Post-Classical Ensemble was created by Angel Gil-Ordóñez and Joseph Horowitz in 2001, and made its official debut in May 2003. "More than an orchestra," it breaks out of classical music, with its implied notion of a high-culture remote from popular art. Its concerts regularly incorporate folk song, dance, film, poetry, and commentary in order to serve existing audiences hungry for deeper engagement, and to cultivate adventurous new listeners. Radio. The Ensemble made its sold-out Kennedy Center debut in Fall 2005 in "Celebrating Don Quixote," featuring a commissioned production of Manuel de Falla's sublime puppet opera Master Peter's Puppet Show. 2006-2007 included four programs at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. In 2007-2008 P-CE is presented twice by the Clarice Smith Center, and also by the Library of Congress ("Revueltas in Context," March 14) and the Strathmore Performing Arts Center ("Free to Sing, February 16). By season's end, P-CE will have performed more than two dozen concerts and recorded two DVDs and a CD in its five-year history. In June 2005, in association with the American Film Institute and Naxos Records, Post-Classical Ensemble presented two classic American documentaries whose scores, by Virgil Thomson, were performed live. These presentations generated a Naxos DVD (released Jan. 2007 and called "revelatory" by Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post) and CD (released last October). The performance of Aaron Copland's The City last October at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center will generate a similar Naxos DVD. Post-Classical Ensemble returns to the Clarice Smith Center on April 6, 2008, for "Artists in Exile," a program exploring the New World fates of the composers Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, and the film-maker Fritz Lang; Weill's Walt Whitman songs - a high point of his American career -- will for the first time be performed in the US with orchestral accompaniment. Post-Classical Ensemble, Inc. is a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation [IRS 501(c)(3)]
