Tickets will go on sale September 15, 2026
The GRAMMY®-winning Akropolis Reed Quintet returns to Rackham Auditorium alongside Pulitzer Prize and 3x GRAMMY® winner composer Jennifer Higdon for the Michigan premiere of her first reed quintet, Rush Not The Reeds.
Detroit soprano Shara Nova will also join Akropolis for Nico Muhly’s five-movement song-cycle, Hymns for Private Use, which Gramophone Magazine lauded for its "sheer musical imagination." Akropolis will also perform their 7th album in its entirety, A Soulful Nexus by Derrick Skye, a 30-minute transcultural work shaped by deep listening across musical traditions.
Program
Nico Muhly Hymns for Private Use with soprano Shara Nova
Derrick Skye A Soulful Nexus
Jennifer Higdon Rush Not The Reeds (with the composer present)
+Read more about each work here
The Full Afternoon
2:30 pm ~ Pre-concert Talk featuring Akropolis and Jennifer Higdon
3:00 pm ~ Concert
5:00 pm ~ Private catered reception with the artists and composer Jennifer Higdon
About The Artists
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Founded in 2009, the Akropolis Reed Quintet is a Billboard-charting, 7-time national prize-winning ensemble whose 2025 recording of Strands won the GRAMMY® Award for Best Instrumental Composition at the 67th Annual GRAMMY® Awards. Comprising five reed players and entrepreneurs unbounded by limits or categorization, Akropolis has graced the Classical Billboard Charts with each of their last three albums, including #2 in April, 2024, and has won seven national chamber music prizes including the 2014 Fischoff Gold Medal. Having premiered and commissioned more than 200 works by living artists and composers, they are pioneers and champions of a new genre of classical music—the reed quintet. Read More +
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Shara Nova is a composer, vocalist, and producer currently creating from Detroit, Michigan. Shara has released six albums under the moniker My Brightest Diamond and has composed works for The Crossing, Conspirare, iSing Silicon Valley, yMusic, Brooklyn Rider, Nadia Sirota, Cantus Domus, Nordic Voices, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Roomful of Teeth, Aarhus Symfoni, Oregon Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, the BBC Concert Orchestra, and the Detroit Opera Educational touring company, among others. In 2024 she starred in the Tony Award Winning musical “Illinoise” on Broadway, directed by Justin Peck, co-written by Jackie Sibblies Drury with music by Sufjan Stevens, with a live album released on Nonesuch Records.
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Jennifer Higdon was born on New Year’s Eve, 1962 (Brooklyn, NY). She didn’t start playing an instrument until she taught herself to play the flute at the age of 15 and began formal studies at 18 when she entered college. Despite this late start, the Pulitzer Prize and three-time Grammy winner has become a major figure in Classical music and is one of the few individuals in the U.S. who makes her living from commissions. Higdon averages 300 performances a year of her works, in many genres within classical music: from opera to chamber, symphonic to band, solo works to concerti. She has even written works in forms not tackled before: a bluegrass/classical hybrid concerto, a concerto for the entire low brass section of an orchestra (at the request of Maestro Ricardo Muti), and one that features 6 soloists (for Eighth Blackbird).
After receiving the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for her Violin Concerto, Higdon also won a Grammy for her Percussion Concerto...a singular feat which no other classical composer has ever managed: two of the biggest major awards for two different pieces in one year. Additionally, she was awarded one of the largest and most prestigious composition prizes in the world, The Nemmers Prize in Music from Northwestern University. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Koussevitzky Foundation Fellowship, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, an Independence Foundation Grant, and funding from the NEA. A winner of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition’s American Composers Invitational, her Secret & Glass Gardens was performed by the semi-finalists in 2005. Her first opera, Cold Mountain, sold out its premiere run in Santa Fe, as well as in North Carolina, and Philadelphia (becoming the third highest selling opera in Opera Philadelphia’s history). Cold Mountain won the prestigious International Opera Award for Best World Premiere in 2016; the first American opera to do so in the award’s history.