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In the News

Billboard-charting Akropolis Reed Quintet celebrates 15th year with free Bravo! Vail community concert performance

The ensemble will be performing Gershwin’s "American in Paris" and Derrick Skye’s "A Soulful Nexus" at the Vail Interfaith Chapel on Thursday.
July 10, 2024

The Akropolis Reed Quintet isn’t topping Taylor Swift in the Billboard Hot 100, but the fact the ensemble is pushing up against the London Symphony Orchestra on the chart’s weekly classical lists is still significant.

“It’s a big deal because what we play is nothing like that,” said saxophonist Matt Landry, whose group has had three Billboard-charting pieces, including “Are We Dreaming the Same Dream,” which rose as high as No. 2 for most streams.

“All these are new pieces, new voices — a new story,” Landry said.

Akropolis, which ends its five-day Bravo! Vail residency with a free community concert on Thursday at 1 p.m. at the Vail Interfaith Chapel, has an interesting story itself.

Humble beginnings

Dan Goff brought the group together at the University of Michigan 15 years ago after receiving reed quintet music from a quintet based in the Netherlands. He gathered with his fellow bandmates — bassoonist Ryan Reynolds, bass clarinetist Andrew Koeppe, oboist Tim Gocklin and clarinetist Kari Landry (now Matt Landry’s wife) — to try it out.

“And (they) just started having some fun playing these reed quintet arrangements of some late-Romantic, early-contemporary music like Ravel and Debussy and even some Bach,” said Landry, who joined when Goff left after receiving a job offer with the U.S. Army Field Band.

“Once I joined, we all decided to just kind of start building our own path and start forging a legacy for the reed quintet,” Landry continued. “Which then necessitated commissioning and creating new music — which is really what we’ve been known for ever since.”

The college friends found their name courtesy of an inside joke rooted in the Ann Arbor campus’ brick buildings. After an anonymous student wrote the word ‘brick’ into the snow, it became the go-to word for everything from insults to nicknames.

“So when we decided to find a name, we googled the word brick,” Landry said. “Turns out, there’s a town in New Jersey called Brick township.” The last name of the mayor? Akropolis.

“We’re happy that it started with an ‘a’ and allows us to be listed high,” Landry joked.

BBC Music Magazine described the group as a “sonically daring ensemble” specializing in performing “new works with charisma and integrity.” Akropolis has won seven national chamber music prizes, including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal.

Originally destined for the music education career path, Landry said when the group started out playing at libraries and members’ churches, it took courage to envision things blossoming the way they have.

“But as soon as we started playing together, we had an inkling that it was something that might be different and unique enough — and high quality enough — to carve a path,” he said. “At the same time, we didn’t look that far into the future. The only thing we really cared about was taking care of each other, building our relationships and making great music.”

If they did that, Landry said, they knew they’d stay together. Though Reynolds has since relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, and Gocklin to Greeley, Colorado, where he is an instructor at the University of Northern Colorado, the group has passed the hat around to ensure they finance ways to meet up and perform.

Working with the next generation of artists

In Vail, Akropolis performed a community concert on Tuesday and gave multiple Young Listeners shows this week as well. Landry said the group’s interactions with young people is something they plan with serious intentionality.

The year after winning the Fischoff Gold Medal, Akropolis received the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award. The ensemble runs a summer festival in Detroit called Together We Sound and holds an annual school-year long residency at three Detroit-area high schools, teaching composition. At the end of the year, Akropolis records the works on YouTube.

“We see young people as artists and collaborators. They have a different skill set; we don’t look at them as less trained and experienced,” Landry said. “We look at them as very trained and experienced in their own ways of looking at the world.”

The arch of Thursday’s concert is driven by different ideas of dance, Landry said. The thread is woven from Ravel’s traditional baroque sounds to Derrick Skye’s infusion of Persian classical music with electronic dance.

“You just kind of have to hear how it works,” Landry said. “It’s amazing.”

The afternoon ends with something a bit more familiar: Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” However, the reed quintet genre has been around for less than 40 years, so every number will sound unique.

“We’re creating a genre in and of itself. So, when people come to our concerts, they’ll hear a lot of new things,” Landry said before adding that composers commission pieces “customized to all the things we love to do well as a group.”

“That creates a very unique set of repertoire you can’t really hear anywhere else,” he said. “When people come to hear us, we really want them to feel like they couldn’t have had that experience anywhere else. And that comes down to the interaction between the five of us.”

Read the full article at VailDaily.com