Maverick Family Saturday: Windsync with Viet Cuong, Composer

Bastille Day Weekend at the Maverick

Garrett Hudson, flute
Emily Tsai, oboe
Graeme Steele Johnson, clarinet
Kara LaMoure, bassoon
Anni Hochhalter, horm

Viet Cuong, composer

WindSync’s signature concert program for children and families celebrates storytelling through music. Young people meet the wind instruments as the quintet introduces itself through a good old-fashioned Texas hoedown, and they warm up their imaginations with a musical trip to the moon. Star composer Viet Cuong will lead listeners through his brand new piece Flora, a musical portrait of different desert plants written specifically for WindSync. The audience performs, too, with some brave volunteers joining WindSync for “The Moose Song,” before everyone claps rhythm patterns in a rousing finale!

Versatile and vibrant, the musicians of WindSync “play many idioms authoritatively, elegantly, with adroit technique, and with great fun” (All About the Arts). In the span of one performance, the quintet can cover vast musical ground from revitalized standard repertoire to freshly inked works to folk and American Songbook, the common thread telling a compelling story about music history and our human selves.

WindSync frequently eliminates the “fourth wall” between musicians and audience by performing from memory, creating an extraordinary connection. This personal performance style, combined with the ensemble’s three-pronged mission of artistry, education, and community-building, lends WindSync its reputation as ”a group of virtuosos who are also wonderful people, too” (Alison Young, Classical MPR).

The “alluring” (The New York Times), “arresting” (Gramophone), “irresistible” (San Francisco Chronicle), and “exhilarating” (Chicago Tribune) music of Vietnamese-American composer Viet Cuong (b. 1990) has been commissioned and performed on six continents by musicians and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Eighth Blackbird, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sō Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, Atlanta Symphony, Sandbox Percussion, Albany Symphony, PRISM Quartet, and Dallas Winds, among many others. Cuong’s music has been featured in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, National Gallery of Art, and Library of Congress, and his works for wind ensemble have amassed several hundreds of performances worldwide, including at Midwest, WASBE, and CBDNA conferences.