Hopefully you’ve been following Armando Bayolo’s postings on our Forum about his adventures with Louis Andriessen’s De Materie – I’ve known about it for over a year now and it’s intensely satisfying seeing a good friend’s massive endeavors come to fruition. If you’re even remotely close to Washington DC tonight, there’s nothing culturally more important on the Eastern Seaboard than Great Noise Ensemble’s performance of this massive work by one of the 20th century’s most important composers. From the GNE website:
De Materie incorporates eclectic musical influences, ranging from Johann Sebastian Bach and Igor Stravinsky to the old Netherlands chanson “L’homme armé” and 20th-century boogie-woogie. GNE stretches the limits of both their personnel roster and their performing ambitions with this opera, which clocks in at over 70 performers including a sixty-member orchestra, chorus, vocal soloists and narrators.
6:30 – tonight – at the National Gallery of Art (directions here). If I wasn’t so far away I’d be there, but there’s a lot of you out there that are, so go already…and shake Armando’s hand afterwards – he’ll deserve it.
Ooops … I forgot the link to the NGA program note to the concert:
http://www.nga.gov/programs/pdf/10music_10-24.pdf
I was out of town or I would have attended this in an instant. Congratulations to Armando and to his soloists, the large ensemble of professional and student musicians, the sound designer, and to the NGA for this humanistic musical programming. The Washington Post chief music critic did attend, and wrote a respectable review in this morning’s paper (Tuesday).
Louis Andriessen was in attendance (as was Roger Reynolds, the last times I.M. Pei’s National Gallery East Wing Atrium was used for contemporary music). Too bad the concert could not also have been presented the day before, Saturday night, at the Millennium Stage inside the Kennedy Center mega-lobby and broadcast over the internet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102504733.html