Urban Legend
May 11, 2012 - 8:00pm
The Atlas Performing Arts Center
1333 H Street NE
Washington, D.C.
On May 11th, Great Noise Ensemble takes its place as the Resident New Music Ensemble at one of Washington, D.C.’s most exciting venues, The Atlas Performing Arts Center in the burgeoning H Street Arts & Entertainment District. Featured on this program are premieres of new works by Randall Woolf, Andrew Earle Simpson, David Smooke, and the Washington premiere of Stefan Freund’s Three Urban Images.
The pieces featured on this concert highlight not only locales and characters that make life in an urban setting so vibrant, but also the concepts and ideals that contribute to the diversity and fascinating rhythms of life among dense humanity. Stefan Freund’s Three Urban Images features the cast and setting of his first year after returning to living in Rochester, New York after living in a small town, drawing its portraits from the very street corner where Freund lived in that first year. David Smooke’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death springs from a collection of 18 sculptures by Frances Glessner Lee of the same name, each depicting in minute detail the death scene of a particular unexplained demise, now housed in the Office of the Medical Examiner in Baltimore, here translated into a concerto for toy piano and orchestra. Urban Legends is a setting of rhymes by four rap MCs, each of whom was asked by Randall Woolf to create a modern day myth. Andrew Earle Simpson’s Double Concerto for Guitar, Violin, and Chamber Orchestra mixes classical and folk musical styles into each other, creating a distinctive sound-world in which pentatonic melodies, blue notes, extended techniques, fiddling and strumming patterns, tone clusters, open-string drones and other elements create a concerto that is alternately lyrical, melancholy, and joyful.
Tickets: $25 General / $15 Students
Tickets are available via the Atlas Performing Arts Center’s website.
Information and Directions To The Atlas Performing Arts Center
In “Philosphy II,” Great Noise Ensemble explores the beauty and complexity of ideas and the intermingling of thoughts, images, memories and concepts to become art at The Cutting Edge New Music Festival at Symphony Space with works by Matt van Brink, Alexandra Gardner, Carlos Carrillo, Victoria Bond, Marc Mellits, and featuring the world premiere of Cornelius Duffallo’s Paranoid Symmetries.