Bang on a Can: Long Play Festival at BRIC Ballroom
Three performances in one day at BRIC Ballroom, as a part of Long Play Festival 2026.
1:00 pm – Anzû Quartet and Friends play Ken Thomson
3:30 pm – Exceptet performs Vangelis L’Apocalypse des animaux
6:00 pm – Florent Ghys and Mantra Percussion with opener Owen Weaver
“Each project from the composer and multi-reed player Ken Thomson has been good news,” wrote The New York Times about the Bang on a Call All-Stars clarinetist and composer’s newest co-led project, the Anzû Quartet. Anzû Quartet, a collaboration of musicians from Bang on a Can, Eighth Blackbird, Mivos Quartet and Bearthoven, play the New York premiere Ken Thomson’s “Uneasy” (released on Cantaloupe Music 2025), then add to their forces to play Thomson’s 2018 clarinet quintet “Pall.” Plus the US premiere of “Keep Your Head Down” (2026) for bass clarinet and piano.
Exceptet performs Vangelis’s pioneering score to the first episode of Frédéric Rossif’s 1973 docuseries, L’Apocalypse des animaux, live-to-film, arranged by clarinetist Chuck Furlong. Vangelis’s music accompanying this documentary has become a cult classic, but to our knowledge, this Rossif series has never been screened in the US—certainly not with a live chamber ensemble! Featuring material that doesn’t exist anywhere else, this performance brings to life both a classic film and its score.
Zemblanity and Other Serendipities sonifies visual accidents, whether fortuitous or deliberately staged. Written for small percussion instruments, electronics, and video, the piece is a series of uninterrupted short movements, with video starting in bucolic downtown St. Louis and finishing among the playful trees of Oregon. The piece weaves ordinary moments into rhythmic and harmonic material, transforming incidental gestures into musical structures that shift between inevitability and unexpected discovery. Owen Weaver opens with Same Face!.
You can get access to this show with a Long Play Pass.
Bang on a Can presents the 5th year of Long Play, a four-day destination music festival, presented from Thursday, April 30 through Sunday, May 3, 2026. Long Play takes place at multiple venues around Downtown Brooklyn and features 70+ concerts, including the Bang on a Can All-Stars playing a brand new arrangement of the iconic Philip Glass album Glassworks in its entirety and Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer prize-winning Anthracite Fields with Trinity Choir, Steve Reich’s classic Sextet plus Electric Counterpoint performed live by 13 electric guitarists, the legendary Billy Hart Quartet, the esteemed and extraordinary Amina Claudine Myers, and the US premiere of Kali Malone.
Full 4-day and Supporter Passes are on sale now, as well as 1-day Saturday and Sunday passes.