Returning to Sarasota and Concord

Hi everyone! It’s been quit a busy start to the month for Sybarite5. All in one weekend, we premiered Mohammed Fairouz’s piece New York Minutes at the cell, had our Park Slope debut with Five Boroughs Music Festival, performed for a wonderful and warm community at the Trinity-Pawling School in upstate New York, and unveiled two new arrangements from the fantastic composer Paul Kim. Next up, we will return to the old stomping grounds of our own Sarah Whitney—Concord, MA. Building on our sold-out show at First Parish Church there last year, we will perform a Saturday night show and a Sunday matinee. We hope our friends in the Boston area will be able to come to one of these! We are also excited to return for the fourth consecutive year to one of our favorite places in the world to perform: Sarasota, FL. Our time in SRQ this year will be a bit different than in the past, as we will be collaborating with the Key Chorale for the first time ever! We have not worked with vocalists since our acclaimed DIDO project in 2008, so suffice it to say that we are really looking forward to this. We will present a program that juxtaposes Mozart’s Vespers with our version of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android expanded to include chorus, as well as a World Premiere arrangement of Radiohead’s No Surprises by our own Louis Levitt. For our fans in Sarasota, this will be an event not to be missed. We will perform the program twice on April 22 (at 4:00 and 7:30pm), so that as many people can hear it as possible!

We will also launch a brand new program with Florida’s New College, So You Think You Can Compose. This will be the third year in a row that we have partnered with the New College Composition Department and its amazing director Bret Aarden, having worked with them on our New Music Idol concerts over the past two years. “So You Think You Can Compose” will involve advanced composition students who will each write short pieces for our ensemble. We will work intensively with each student to discuss and improve their piece, culminating in a performance of the new works in Sainer Hall at New College on April 19. We have worked with many of these students through New Music Idol- a competition-based project in which students each wrote one-minute long pieces and a winner was chosen through audience vote), and we can’t wait to see what they will come up with for us this year!

In addition to these activities, we will also be visiting local schools to work with the students; in particular we are thrilled to be returning to the Out of Door Academy.

For a complete listing of the public events during our weeklong residency in SRQ, and to purchase tickets for the Concord shows, please visit the Tour Dates section of our website. Thanks for reading, and see you soon, Concord and Sarasota!