WindSync embraces classics from across centuries of music writing, using their vibrant “fourth wall”-breaking approach to performance to make standard repertoire a fresh experience. Whether originally written for wind quintet instruments or specially arranged for them, WindSync combines familiar favorites and folk music songbooks and traditions with an actively growing body of freshly inked works, threading it all together to tell compelling stories about music history and human selves. On the heels of All Worlds, All Times, their debut album that “will make you want to get up and dance” (The WholeNote), the quintet hit number-one on the Billboard Classical chart with the works of Miguel Del Aguila, recorded in the famed Studio Two at Abbey Road.
Recently celebrating 15 years as an ensemble, WindSync has leaped from prizewinning Concert Artists Guild, Fischoff, and M-Prize Competition performances to the stages of Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more. They also regularly hold educational residencies with the likes of the Grand Teton Music Festival and Chamber Music Northwest, and this spring returns for a full week with Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play programs.
WindSync bookends this performance with music that mimics the great garden of our world. Patterned, looping melodies and variations borrowed from early music are transformed through Nordic folk tradition and natural analogs of electronic effects, buoying the spirit with the trio Väsen’s styling of Gabriel Höök’s gracious music for the “father of taxonomy” Carl Linnæus Polones as well as Viet Cuong’s Flora, a time-lapse of emblematic desert plant life like agave and the Joshua tree. Such scenic frivolity would normally whisk through Mozart’s wind serenades, but the composer turns dramatic in the minor-key “night music” that follows this peppy opening. Yet even in darkest night, the life cycle continues to flow in its bouncing canon and variations. Sowing the seeds of a more verdant future underscores Shawn Okpebholo’s Rise at the center of this program. The score is alight with urgency: the time is now to address ills and injustices—to embrace a future where there is grace and peace, “this little light of mine” must be given root to spark and shine.
