PostClassical Ensemble Explores Music & Architecture With The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott

PostClassical Ensemble (PCE) begins the 2023/24 season with Bouncing off the Walls: Music and Architecture on November 16, 2023.

Joining PCE Conductor and Music Director Angel Gil-Ordóñez will be special guest curator Philip Kennicott, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The Washington Post. Additionally, Kennicott and Gil-Ordóñez will be joined in contribution by acclaimed DC architect Hany Hassan. This concert also marks the first in the tenure of PCE's new Executive Director, David Mozur. The concert will take place at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater at 7:30pm. 

Bouncing off the Walls will demonstrate that music and architecture share a vocabulary and overlap through analogies and metaphors. Composers “build” highly structured symphonies while architects dream of buildings that unfold to the senses like music. The concert will explore the complex relation between the two art forms, from music that was specifically written for particular buildings, to the early 20th Century modernist efforts to reduce both forms to their elemental materials.

The program for the evening includes an overture by Beethoven written to celebrate a newly remodeled theater and opera house, a work for two sets of spatially separated brass instruments composed by Giovanni Gabrieli for the mighty Basilica of San Marco in Venice, a symphony by Haydn featuring one of the most complicated ‘architectural' forms ever composed, a short but volcanic work by Anton Webern, and a classic overture by Rossini, reassembled to maximize the acoustic possibilities of the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater. The program will be roughly 1 hour and 15 minutes with no intermission. 

“At different times in my career I've been focused on both music and architecture, but I've never been quite sure the correlation between them is a simple or obvious one,” says guest curator Kennicott. “Curating this concert is a terrific opportunity to dig deeper into the relationship between these two connected art forms.” 

Tickets to Bouncing off the Wall: Music and Architecture are available online through the Kennedy Center website (https://www.kennedy-center.org/). Tickets start at $45. Patrons purchasing tickets to all three of PCE's 2023/24 concerts at the Kennedy Center will receive 15% off their total ticket price. Contact the Kennedy Center Instant Charge office (open 7 days a week, 10am-6pm) at 202-467-4600 and request the "PCE Bundle."

For all other ticket-related customer service inquiries, call the Kennedy Center Advance Sales Box Office at (202) 416-8540. For more information about Bouncing off the Walls and all upcoming concerts, please visit: postclassical.com

*This performance is an external rental presented in coordination with the Kennedy Center Campus Rentals Office and is not produced by the Kennedy Center.

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