SYMPHO Presents ASCENDING DARKNESS: SOUNDTRACK TO A DREAM Tonight

SYMPHO presents two new concert experiences in New York City, Ascending Darkness: Soundtrack to a Dream tonight, May 8, 2013 at 8 p.m. at the Church of the Ascension (Fifth Avenue at 10th Street), and KAPOW! on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 at 7 p.m. at the Rubin Museum of Art (150 W. 17th Street).

SYMPHO is an orchestra that thrives on engaging audiences by placing classical music in new contexts. Its concerts range from commissioned evening-length compositions in unusual venues to thought-provoking, multisensory performances of pre-existing works from the existing classical canon.

ASCENDING DARKNESS: SOUNDTRACK TO A DREAM

What happens in a concert when the lights go out? What does the audience hear when it can't see? What becomes of the concert experience when stripped of visual stimulation and concomitant distractions? What happens when audience members are surrounded by music in the dark? Sympho, the ever-innovative New York-based orchestra, plans to find out.

Sympho and its Artistic Director, Paul Haas, present "Ascending Darkness," a concert experience in the dark, in New York City's famed Church of the Ascension. "Ascending Darkness" invites its listeners to immerse themselves in a dream. Upon entering the sanctuary, audience members are swept into a half-lighted, quietly conscious state. The opening notes of Rameau's "Scène Funèbre" from Castor et Pollux then pull the audience into the darkness of slumber. From there, using the music of Pärt, Grieg, Messiaen, Rameau, and new works by Paul Haas, Sympho weaves a dream sequence whose continuous narrative evokes struggle, death, and reconciliation. Musicians move around the space and music envelops the audience from all sides. Sympho's lighting designer occasionally breaks the monochrome of darkness with various degrees of light, but only as it assists the flow of the narrative.

Haas conceived of this program idea in response to his own experience as a concert-goer. "I've often sat through parts of a concert with my eyes closed," he says, "to focus on the music and to avoid the usual distractions - the patron reading the program here, or the ­glow of the iPhone there. And that led me to wonder if Sympho could just create a concert with that built-in cocoon of darkness." Given Sympho's mission to present classical music in new, thoughtful, and thought-provoking ways, "it was only natural that we should experiment with the idea," he continues.

"But to be clear," Haas emphatically explains, "the goal of this concert is not just to turn off the lights. Rather, it's to allow the darkness, in conjunction with a carefully-curated and commissioned program of musical offerings, to transport the audience into an altered state of awareness. The result should be a one-of-a-kind evening of glorious music."

ASCENDING DARKNESS: SOUNDTRACK TO A DREAM will be presented on Wednesday, May 8, 2013, 8 p.m. at the Church of the Ascension, Fifth Avenue at 10th Street, New York, NY.

PROGRAM:

Rameau: "Scène funèbre" from Castor et Pollux
Rameau: "Musette en rondeau" from Les Fêtes d'Hébé
Pärt: Pari intervallo
Rameau: "Prélude" from Les Boréades
Pärt: Solfeggio
Rameau: "Orage" from Platée
Grieg: "Ase's Death" from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1
Rameau: "L'entrée de Polymnie" from Les Boréades
Messiaen: O sacrum convivium
Pärt: Fratres
Paul Haas: Commissioned music for Ascending Darkness

Tickets: Reserved $50, General $25, Student $15 (ID required); available at www.symphoconcerts.org and Brown Paper Tickets.

KAPOW!

Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and...the Green Lama? The lesser-known, but equally lethal, Green Lama basks in the spotlight in this new Sympho event in June. Last season, Sympho introduced New Yorkers to this Buddhist crusader's adventures, and the response was uniformly enthusiastic, with salon.com describing the "mixed-media sensory experience" as "...like nothing I've seen before and...even border[ing] on the spiritual."

While "The Green Lama" presented Episode 2 of the Buddhist crusader's adventures, "KAPOW!" presents the stand-alone Episodes 1 and 3. Seven musicians from Sympho will provide the live, polystylistic soundtrack -- both acoustic and electronic, pre-composed and improvised -- to projected images from the comic books themselves, while acclaimed actors will bring the words and images to life onstage. Narrated and directed by WQXR's Elliott Forrest, "KAPOW!" brings Jethro Dumont's - the Green Lama's - crime-fighting escapades to life. Law and Order SVU's Linus Roache will portray the Green Lama.

As an enticing palette-cleanser between episodes, Sympho will take audience members through a sonic and visual "tour" of selections from the Rubin Museum's past and current collections, pairing the projected images with a wide variety of improvised and commissioned musical selections. "Electric Sheep" fans may also find a surprise or two included in the mix.

KAPOW! will be presented on Wednesday, June 12, 2013, 7 p.m. at the Rubin Museum of Art, 150 West 17th Street, New York, NY. Tickets: General $25; available at www.rmanyc.org, by calling 212.620.5000 x344 and at www.symphoconcerts.org.

Sympho performances offer a distinctive and expanded view of the classical music experience. In collaboration with like-minded musicians and artists from other disciplines, Sympho provides audiences with engaging, immersive, multisensory experiences.

Starting in 2006 with its critically-acclaimed debut concert experience, REWIND, Paul Haas has honed a performance practice based on maximizing the visceral impact of sound on audience members by using alternative musician placement and movement constructs. Informed by the great masters of the Renaissance and early Baroque periods, church music of the Episcopal liturgy, and various world music traditions, Haas and Sympho are deeply interested in the sonic possibilities of unusually large or idiosyncratic performance spaces.

In 2011 Sympho was commissioned to create a site-specific concert event for the opening night of the Park Avenue Armory's avant-garde Tune-In Music Festival, playing to a capacity crowd in the Armory's 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Following in the footsteps of artistic luminaries Meredith Monk and the Kronos Quartet, Sympho was also commissioned in 2012 by collector and arts advocate Steven Oliver to create an immersive, site-specific concert experience for The Tower, a monolithic eight-story, 80-foot tall sculpture and performance venue designed by Ann Hamilton. This concrete structure, which is 24 feet in diameter and located in the heart of California's wine country, embraced both performers and audience on its two parallel staircases, yielding a sonic environment that surprised and delighted the ear and eye. For more information, visit www.SymphoConcerts.org.

In addition to founding and serving as the Artistic Director of Sympho, Paul Haas is the Music Director of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas (SoNA), and his guest conducting engagements have included performances with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, San Antonio Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, and the New World Symphony, among others, as well as festival appearances.

As former Music Director of the renowned New York Youth Symphony, which performs regularly at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Haas and the NYYS were awarded the ASCAP-League of American Orchestras Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming, the first and only time that coveted award has ever been presented to a youth orchestra. Recently, Mr. Haas was selected out of hundreds of candidates to perform in the League of American Orchestras' prestigious National Conductor Preview.

Haas also enjoys an active composing career. He conducted the premiere of his Matthew Says for orchestra, chorus, and two violin soloists at Carnegie Hall in 2007 and has premiered nine other orchestral pieces of his in New York City during recent seasons. San Francisco-based Hope Mohr Dance commissioned a large-scale score by Haas, premiering the work (The Unsayable) in March 2011. Recently, New York Magazine singled out Haas as one of the "New New York School" of composers.

Paul Haas is a graduate of Yale University and The Juilliard School, where he studied conducting as a Bruno Walter Fellow with Otto-Werner Mueller. His other conducting teachers include Michael Tilson Thomas and Leonard Slatkin. He also studied opera conducting in Dresden, Germany, at the Hochschule für Musik. Haas currently resides in New York City with his wife and two daughters. For more information, visit www.paulhaas.com.