Press

During the shutdown, PostClassical Ensemble has been sharing archived videos of their performances, followed up with Zoom chats bringing listeners and artists together. Although Gil-Ordóñez was initially skeptical about Zoom chats, he sees now that it is a powerful way to enhance the relationship with the ensemble’s audience. “We are putting faces on those who have followed us for years,” he enthused. “We can see them, and we are giving them a platform to participate more in the discussions. So this is a very positive part of having no live music: we are getting to know our audiences better. We are planning on continuing this as a complement to everything we have done before. To me this is the most important lesson of this time.”

He is an angel. In fact, that’s his first name and his passport ends with the last names Gil-Ordóñez. Perhaps it is more appropiate to portray him as an archangel for the immense work he has done in favor of music –real music– not only in his commendable career as a teacher at Wesleyan university and Georgetown, but in the invaluable work leading Post-Classical Ensemble, hand in hand with the genius of Joseph Horowitz.

For PostClassical Ensemble, it is not enough to complain about the monotony, or the ethnic or social bias, of symphonic programs. [Horowitz and Angel Gil-Ordóñez] devise alternatives… They produce stimulating evidence the music belongs to life and to the cultural and political environment of the times in which it was created… Classical music needs to leave the confinement of concert halls.

The Indonesian gamelan will be the centerpiece of PostClassical Ensemble’s latest musical creation, Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience, on Jan. 23 at the Washington National Cathedral.

PostClassical Ensemble was lucky. “An Armenian Odyssey: The Color of Pomegranates,” the chamber orchestra’s major spring production, preceded — barely — the ban on public gatherings intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. Apart from any then-unknown health risks, which we hope were minimal, the audience of two or three thousand, including a large subset of D.C.’s Armenian American community, was lucky too. Because the concert, presented on March 4 at Washington National Cathedral, was a powerful, moving and musically exquisite experience.

Armenia, the first country to declare Christianity its state religion, has a long and glorious cultural history. PostClassical Ensemble’s latest cultural festival, “The Color of Pomegranates,” is honoring that tradition with a series of events, which reached a pinnacle Wednesday night with a spectacular multimedia performance filling the nave of Washington National Cathedral.

La página de crítica especializada Washington Classical Review, liderada por los críticos de The Washington Post Lawrence A. Johnson y Charles T. Downey, publicó un recuerdo de los mejores momentos musicales de 2019, un ranking que encabeza el concierto del conjunto PostClassical Ensemble, del que Ángel Gil-Ordóñez es director musical.

The sound of the gamelan, the traditional ensemble of mostly percussion instruments from Indonesia, profoundly moved Debussy and many other composers. This memorable concert featured music by Debussy, Messiaen, Poulenc, McPhee, Alves, and Harrison, alongside performances by gamelan ensembles of the Javanese and Balinese varieties. The echo-prone nave of National Cathedral resonated with wild colors.

Herrmann composed some of the best-known film music ever written — especially the scores he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock. Now a new CD shows another side of Herrmann that’s equally memorable […] The variety of music on this CD –colorful, romantic, witty, patriotic, nerve-wracking– shows how much Bernard Herrmann’s concert and radio music equaled the astonishing range of his work for film.

Each new album by PostClasical Ensemble and its director, Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, is both a surprise and a discovery. The deserved result of investigating beyond the predictable. And this new album of his is not an exception in his line, but the joyous confirmation of it.

The disc as a whole showcases not only Herrmann’s compositional skill but also the ability of Gil-Ordóñez and PostClassical Ensemble repeatedly to bring neglected material to life, or rather back to life.

Like many successful Hollywood composers, Bernard Herrmann pursued musical endeavours beyond (in his time) the celluloid. Studies at Juilliard were followed by conducting posts with the New Chamber Orchestra of New York and the CBS Symphony Orchestra, with which he championed music by major figures of the day, including Ives, even as he wrote music for radio programmes and composed concert works and, eventually, movie scores. Herrmann’s versatility in three genres – radio, chamber music and film – is captured on this absorbing recording featuring the PostClassical Ensemble, an experimental orchestral laboratory in residence at the Washington National Cathedral.

[…] His latest album on the Naxos label is dedicated to composer Bernard Herrmann, author of the soundtracks for some of Hitchcock’s most famous films. The record offers the absolute first recording of Whitman, a radio drama whose music Herrmann composed in 1944 on texts of the great American poet.

The Ensemble’s latest innovative programming series, with the South Dakota Symphony, examines the controversial relationship of Native American and American identity through music.

Conductor Angel Gil-Ordoñez has always had a passion for music. So much so, that he convinced his parents to let him study music in college at the Madrid Conservatory of Music, as long as he would first study Engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. He completed both degrees and then continued with his musical education and career.

Silence –it’s in the still seconds as a a conductor raises his arms. It’s also what Angel Gil-Ordóñez, music director of DC-based PostClassical Ensemble, calls the “condition” for sound. “As my teacher and mentor, Sergiu Celibidache, used to say, “Sound is not music,” he recalls. “Sound, under certain circumstances, can become music.”

We spoke with Ángel Gil-Ordoñez who presents a new album, recorded with PostClassical Ensemble, with works by Bernard Herrmann.

Ricardo de Cala from Radio Nacional de España’s radio program Maestros cantores asks Angel Gil-Ordóñez about his new projects.

Angel Gil-Ordóñez, the musical director of PostClassical Ensemble, tells us about the new recording of works by the North American composer Bernard Herrmann.

Featured works include music from his score for the movie Psycho, his Clarinet Quintet Souvenirs de Voyage, and the radio play Whitman with music by Herrmann, in honor of the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth. This program, which was broadcast live earlier this month from the cathedral, will be hosted by author, music historian and PostClassical Ensemble co-founder Joseph Horowitz, PostClassical Music Director and co-founder Maestro Angel Gil-Ordonez, Exploring Music host Bill McGlaughlin and WWFM host David Osenberg.

The Chairman Mixes is a series of chats with cocktail pairings. In this first episode, Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, PostClassical Ensemble’s conductor and music director, joins Douglas Rathbun, PCE’s board chair, looking into the conductor as a profession. The discussion is paired with the 1888 recipe of the classic Martini cocktail.

Un café con… is a series of virtual talks with the Ambassador of Spain, Santiago Cabanas, and Spanish influencers living in the U.S. Organized by the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain and hosted by the Ambassador, during 30 minutes you will have the opportunity to get to know these special guests better.

Mirador Cultural TV interviews the internationally renowned Spanish-American conductor Ángel Gil-Ordoñez, as part of the Christmas Gala concert that the Orchestra and choirs of the Trinitate Philarmonia offered to the Leonese audience at the Renacimiento Auditorium on Wednesday, December 19, 2018.

My professional work as a conductor has been always accompanied with a dedication to young musicians. In this video I present some thoughts about the importance of music education for the youngest, for the underprivileged, and for those whose future professional life won’t be related to artistic activities.