Great Noise Ensemble

at the Charles Sumner School, 2/17/2006

A new, local, chamber group dedicated to contemporary repertoire? Am I dreaming? No. It turns out this town has enough classically trained performers who have a collective screw loose to form a unique little chamber orchestra of sorts.

The program featured some nice tasty morsels: Steve Reich's "Clapping Music," Adam Silverman's "In Another Man's Skin," a chamber concerto in progress by Blair Goins, "Tango Variations" by one of the founding members of the group (and conductor), Armando Bayolo, and a goofy setting of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Tom Schnauber.

Full disclosure: I'm working with the group to figure out how they might function as an "ensemble in residence" for the ACF Chapter, so I'm a little biased.

The room at the Sumner School is fairly dry sounding, which made it difficult to achieve a nice ensemble sound, I'm not sure if that was made worse by the fact that this is only their second (I think?) performance. But overall, this was a promising evening and I'm looking forward to their upcoming concerts: next one in DC is May 12 at the Sitar Center - presented by ACF.