by Jarrett Hoffman
If the reed quintet were a person, it would be a millennial.
A variation on the wind quintet, with flute and horn jettisoned in favor of saxophone and bass clarinet — reed-brethren of oboe, clarinet, and bassoon — the instrumentation was born as recently as 1985, when five high schoolers in Amsterdam came together to form Calefax. The group gradually amassed a body of repertoire where there was none, and began to spread their musical seed.
One of the groups they inspired to spring up is the Detroit-based Akropolis Reed Quintet — oboist Tim Gocklin, clarinetist Kari Landry, saxophonist Matt Landry, bassoonist Ryan Reynolds, and bass clarinetist Andrew Koeppe — winners of the Gold Medal at the 2014 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, among several national prizes.
Now celebrating their 15th-anniversary season, Akropolis will visit Northeast Ohio next week for a recital on the Tuesday Musical series on November 7 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall.
Their program includes Marc Mellits’s Splinter, Willem Jeths’s Maktub, George Gershwin’s An American in Paris (arranged by none other than Calefax saxophonist Raaf Hekkema), and a recent commission of theirs: Omar Thomas’s Moods and Attitudes, a classical work fueled by the composer’s background in jazz, its movements visiting the genres of blues, ballad, and bebop. Tickets are available here.
In darkened theaters around the world last year, just one small sign of life remained — the ghost light, a single bulb traditionally placed onstage overnight while the space is unoccupied. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, these ghost lights became small symbols of hope, keeping the lights on until the performers and the audience could return again.