Akropolis Reed Quintet
Friday, September 30, 2022
Lawrence Memorial Chapel
8 p.m.
Ticket Information
Purchase tickets at the Lawrence University Box Office, located in the Music Drama center, at 420 East College Ave, Appleton, WI 54911 or call the box office at 920-832-6749. Discounts available for LU students, faculty and staff with an LU ID.
The box office will be open Monday through Saturday from 1:00pm until 6:00pm and an hour prior to events.
About Akropolis Reed Quintet
Celebrating their 13th year making music with “faultless detail and refreshing artistry” (I Care if You Listen) as 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, “the performance standards of Akropolis are award winning for a reason” (Fanfare). Remaining the same 5 members since their founding in 2009, Akropolis delivers 120 concerts and educational events worldwide each year and has premiered and commissioned over 130 works by living artists and composers. 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. The “rise of the reed quintet” (Chamber Music America) and Akropolis’ “infallible musicality and huge vitality” (Fanfare) make them one of the most sought-after chamber ensembles today.
Experimenters and creators at their core, “there’s nothing tentative in their approach, and that extends to their programming of multifariously challenging and imaginative new works” (The Wire). Akropolis has collaborated with poets, a metal fabricator, dancers, small business owners, string quartets, pop vocalists, and more. Currently, Akropolis is collaborating with GRAMMY-nominated pianist/composer Pascal Le Boeuf and drummer Christian Euman on an album and touring program drawing classical and jazz idioms together to reflect on American identity, entitled, Are We Dreaming the Same Dream?
Akropolis’ chief collaborators are youth and their Detroit community. 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 summer festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and holds an annual, school year long residency at Cass Tech, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Detroit School of Arts high schools. Akropolis believes anyone can compose great music and during their 20-21 season premiered and recorded more than 30 works by youth aged 12-22 alone.
An engine perpetually generating new sounds and ideas, Akropolis’ 22-23 season will include world premieres by Pulitzer Prize finalist Augusta Read Thomas and Omar Thomas; imaginative renditions of music by Ravel, Bernstein, Rameau, Shostakovich, and Gershwin; Storm Warning, a concerto grosso for reed quintet and wind band by Roshanne Etezady; and touring their recently released 4th album, Ghost Light, lauded for its “range, agility, and grace” (The Whole Note), by “exploring everything from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to racial violence in their native Detroit” (AnEarfull).