Members:
Kari Landry, clarinet
Andrew Koeppe, bass clarinet
Ryan Reynolds, bassoon
Matt Landry, saxophone
Tim Gocklin, oboe
Hailed for their “imagination, infallible musicality, and huge vitality” (Fanfare Magazine), the Akropolis Reed Quintet takes listeners on extraordinary musical adventures. Founded in 2009 at the University of Michigan, the Akropolis has won seven national chamber music prizes since 2011, including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal and the 2015 Fischoff Educator Award. The Akropolis is an alumnus of APAP’s prestigious Young Performer’s Career Advancement Program and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Art Works), the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, CultureSource, Quicken Loans, and Chamber Music America, as well as operating support from the Aaron Copland for Music and the Amphion Foundation.
The Akropolis Reed Quintet‘s impressive list of recent and upcoming appearances include stops at Caramoor, Chamber Music Northwest, the Chautauqua Institution, the Artist Series of Sarasota, Chamber Music Abu Dhabi, and Chamber Music Columbus. The Quintet has been awarded a juried showcase at APAP (YPCA), Chamber Music America twice, the Performing Arts Exchange, the Western Arts Alliance, and the Mid-Atlantic Performing Arts Market. With three studio albums, including its March 2017 release of The Space Between Us, called “pure gold” by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Akropolis has recorded 17 original reed quintet works.
Prolific collaborators, the Akropolis’s 2018 “Together We Sound” Detroit festival features an improvisatory new work with YAK and a concert with acclaimed soprano Shara Nova. The Akropolis premiered the first work for reed quintet and string quartet by David Schiff with the Dover Quartet in 2015, and has performed with such esteemed artists as the Miró Quartet and renowned clarinetist David Shifrin. In 2015 the Akropolis gave an interactive, fully choreographed performance of “Four-Letter-Word“ (Robbie McCarthy) with BodyVox Dance in Portland, Oregon, and has even performed with HarperCollins published author and scientist Vic Strecher. In April 2017 the Akropolis’s residency in Abu Dhabi featured a performance of Marc Mellits’s “Splinter“ with original Arabic poetry performed by Khalifa University students, written around Mellits’s music.
The Akropolis Reed Quintet has commissioned more than 30 works from composers in 7 countries and was selected to adjudicate and premiere the 2018 Barlow Prize funded by the Barlow Endowment, the first time the prize will be given for a reed quintet work. The Akropolis produces a YouTube Web Premiere Series with more than 40,000 views, showcasing new works, arrangements, and composer interviews for a live Internet audience. In 2012 the Quintet created Akropolis Collection and has now sold over 140 original and arranged sheet music works to more than 30 new and established reed quintets.
Originating at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the Akropolis Reed Quintet remains its founding members: Tim Gocklin (oboe), Kari Landry (clarinet), Matt Landry (saxophone), Andrew Koeppe (bass clarinet), and Ryan Reynolds (bassoon).