Audience members get a front-row seat to performances by Metropolis artists at Brownstone in Clinton Hill.

At moments like this, new music sheds its academic strictures and finds its way back to the era of dinnertime entertainments.

Music may feed the soul, but it still goes best with a drink.

People who came out to the Metropolis Brownstone event last Thursday crossed over the threshold of a beautiful three-story Brooklyn apartment into a different sonic universe.

Everyone seemed to congregate in the kitchen, which is where everyone always wants to hang out during house parties.

224 Washington Avenue Brooklyn
October 28, 2010

I’m not really sure if “concert” is the right word at all. Installation? Event? Happening? Experience?

We hope you will join us to experience the BBC Nature Sound Effects Library in this site-specific composition.

For all their eclecticism, these pieces reveal a strong common profile—with tragic ferocity lurking under the sparkling surfaces.

The music of Israeli composer Avner Dorman is so vivacious and so technically proficient that it’s hard to resist… most rewarding is the Mandolin Concerto, which fuses Baroque and Middle Eastern gestures in unusual ways, and which ends with a surprising flourish.

This wonderful program of three concertos and one concerto grosso, all beautifully performed and recorded, is nearly enough to restore the confidence of the most hardened pessimist in the future of classical music.

Many will respond to the joyousness of the writing and youthful enthusiasm of the performances on offer.

The playing of the Metropolis Ensemble led by Andrew Cyr is excellent: sensitive, supportive, very accurate and finely balanced, with a lot of spirit.