Gil-Ordóñez’s Orchestra in N.Y. Times, Washington Post

Adjunct professor of music Angel Gil-Ordóñez’s Post-Classical Ensemble was mentioned in the April 20th edition of The New York Times for performing in Falla and Flamenco at the Brooklyn Academy of Music April 17. The orchestra, paired with a Spanish pianist, performed “a muted by graceful account,” of “Nights in the Gardens of Spain,” a tour of Spanish music “that touches not only on the Gypsy influences that crystallized as flamenco but on Moorish influences as well,” according to the article.

After intermission, Gil-Ordóñez, who also is director of private lessons, chamber music and ensembles and music director of the Wesleyan Orchestra and Wesleyan Concert Choir, led a reduced ensemble in the ballet-pantomime “El Corregidor y la Molinera” (“The Magistrate and the Miller’s Wife”), which Manuel de Falla later expanded as “The Three-Cornered Hat.” But the revised score’s most familiar themes are already here, and they benefit from the transparency of this chamber scoring.

On April 26, the Post-Classical Ensemble was featured in The Washington Post. The article explained that music by Falla (1876-1946) incorporates “the watercolor washes of so-called French Impressionism as well as the guttural melismas of flamenco.”

“El corregidor” was the basis of the ballet “The three-cornered hat,” which was first staged in the United States by Gil-Ordonez. “It is a leaner version of the better-known later work, which has a reworked second half and a larger orchestration, but tells the same basic story: rich magistrate tries to seduce miller’s beautiful wife, and is repeatedly foiled.