“Reimagining Old Favorites” is the theme for Indiana Wind Symphony’s Wind Chamber’s first concert of the 2023-24 season.
The concert features Adam Gorb’s “French Dances Revisited,” which the IWS helped commission in 2004 and presented in 2005.
IWS Music Director Charles Conrad said Gorb was reimagining the music when he wrote it.
“We’re reimagining it 18 years later, seeing if we can find anything new or different about it,” Conrad said.
The IWS concert is set for 7:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Studio Theater at the Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel.
“French Dances Revisited” is from music written in France in the 1600s and 1700s.
“But it’s completely reworked in an early 21st-century style,” Conrad said.
Another piece will be “and the swallow” by Caroline Shaw, which Conrad said was originally a vocal piece.
“In the last couple of years, (Shaw) has really come to prominence as a contemporary American female composer who is doing a lot of good things,” Conrad said. “It’s a slow, soft piece. It’s very calm with nice melodies.”
Conrad said another significant piece of the concert is “Folk Suite No. 2” by William Grant Still, a Black composer who died in 1978.
“It primarily features harp, which you don’t usually hear in a Wind Chamber concert,” Conrad said.
The entire second half of the performance will feature “Sinfonietta” by Joachim Raff, who was a mid-19th century composer.
“He was kind of a second-tier composer, but he wrote a couple of outstanding works,” Conrad said. “This is one of the top Wind Chamber pieces that was written in the 19th century and it’s a big-four movement, full half-concert piece, and we just love playing it. This will be the second time we’ve played it as well.”
