"Another Walker work, “Lyric for Strings,” offered the strings of the PCE a chance to shine. Gil-Ordoñez — one of my favorite conductors in town to watch — achieved breathtaking delicacy and clarity from the violins, and a tactile grit from the cellos and bass."
"a tradition worth repeating"
This unconventional musical program played by a chamber orchestra that — thanks to its conductor’s sensitivity and the excellence of its member instrumentalists — is unsurpassed.
A bold, eccentric program at Kennedy Center brings together two art forms and discovers new ideas about concepts they share.
The occasion for PostClassical Ensemble to devote an evening to Falla was the centennial of “El retablo de maese Pedro (Master Peter’s Puppet Show).” This one-act chamber opera was the second half of an April 19 double-bill that both entertained and enlightened a sold-out audience in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater.
A play on the relationship between the composer and the poet and a recreation by director Ángel Gil-Ordóñez of 'El retablo de Maese Pedro' commemorated in the US capital the centenary of the musical piece inspired by 'Don Quixote'. (English translation)
Wednesday night, I was at the John F. Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater to review the debut presentation of a wildly bold experiment headed up by the eclectic and accomplished PostClassical Ensemble in an orchestral program, Entwined: A Double Feature. As an audience member, you could enter this evening’s alchemic collaboration through any of the parts represented, but, taken as a whole, it proved a dazzling feast.
One of the most unique — which is a gentle way of saying deeply weird — evenings of the year was the PostClassical Ensemble’s “A Wicked New Look,” which presented a captivating concert at the Kennedy Center of miniaturized Mahler favorites custom-cut to accommodate the lowing, glowing bass trombone of classical experimentalist David Taylor. Under conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez, the ensemble wryly turned the composer’s natural and psychological landscapes inside out, with Taylor’s trombone lending the music something between sonic slapstick and brute pathos.
On Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, the PostClassical Ensemble led a quick and beguiling expedition 100 years into the past and about 4,000 miles to the east. On paper, “Paris at Midnight: Jazz and Surrealism in the 1920s” sounded like something lifted from my undergrad course load; in practice, this immersive history lesson felt like a model for how classical music — and the other sounds that swirl around it — can be engagingly presented.
But Gil-Ordóñez worked hard to froth the ensemble up around Taylor’s unruly column of sound. He put fat on the bones of the movement’s various melodies, letting them buckle under their unaccustomed weight. Mourning shudders rattled key lines as the ensemble struggled (often beautifully!) to empathize. Toward the end of the movement, Taylor loped to the rear of the stage, taking his ground-scraping lows with him in a slow, subdued huff. He eventually sidled offstage through a side door, still playing, and a contagious chuckle across the hall closed the movement.
From start to finish, PostClassical proved itself an orchestra in fighting shape, with compelling storytellers across its ranks. Not least of all Gil-Ordóñez, who lent the “Work Song” a living, breathing vitality, with the heft and permanence of a monument you regularly pass but only just noticed.
