classical music insights

Here it is, in a worldwide-exclusive, you-saw-it-here-first preview: the new full portrait of the 2009-2010 Oregon Symphony:

Photo: Oregon Symphony/Leah Nash [click photo to enlarge]

Leah Nash, the photographer commissioned by the symphony to produce the portrait, won the PDN/Billboard award in 2009 for best Live Music photo, of Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons, in performance with the Oregon Symphony as part of the T:B:A Festival.

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If you want live music with your ballet this holiday season, there’s only one place to go: Portland Ballet.  They’re collaborating with the PSU Symphony Orchestra to put on a production of Rossini’s  La Boutique Fantasque – a holiday company tradition.

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As we edge our way into November, and I reflect on what’s going on in the classical music scene here in Portland, I’m finding it remarkable what all has happened already, and what’s about to happen. At the Oregon Symphony, we’ve just completed our third Classical series concerts. The Vancouver Symphony opened its 40th season of concerts. Opera Theater Oregon has just finished a highly successful run of The Beggar’s Opera. The Portland Opera did a run of La Boheme, and is just about to embark upon Philip Glass’ Orphée. OHSU’s noon chamber series presented its first concert (featuring the Arnica Quartet), as did Salem’s Camerata Musica. Third Angle New Music Ensemble presented music from modern-day China, and fEARnoMusic played its most fearless concert yet (and launched a new website). The Borealis Quartet played Friends of Chamber Music’s season opener, and Thomas Hampson opened their vocal series. Van Cliburn Gold medalist Haochen Zang and Jonathan Biss played their recitals for Portland Piano International’s series. The Portland Chamber Orchestra played their first concert of the new season with soloist Carol Wincenc, flute. The Portland Columbia Symphony opened their season with Beethoven and Sibelius. On the horizon? Rumors are that Portland Opera will be recording Orphée. There’s a new chamber music series starting up in January – 45th Parallel. It seems that classical music is alive and well in Portland, after all.

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Violinist Stefan Jackiw

If you have time before your late night Halloween activities on Saturday night, you really owe it to yourself to head down to the Oregon Symphony’s Classical series concert on Saturday night (repeating Sunday afternoon only).  Why?  Well, I’ll tell you why.

First of all, you’ll get to hear our phenomenal woodwind section (and awesome principal trumpeter) in Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin.  I love this piece to death (appropriate for Halloween and the piece’s subject matter, but pardon the pun) and it is worth the price of admission to hear our principal oboist Martin Hebert play the devilishly difficult opening oboe solo with such refinement and grace (and no rushing!!).  It’s been a long time since we’ve performed this piece on a Classical series concert, so chances are you haven’t heard it for some time – so come on down!

Next, the young violinist Stefan Jackiw is playing the D major Mozart Violin Concerto.  This guy is something else – he’s got a beautiful, transparent sound and just the right sensibility for playing Mozart – and he collaborates like a chamber musician.  You will not have heard a Mozart violin concerto performed like this with the Oregon Symphony, well, EVER!

Finally, there is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  Yes, I know – there are some who will say WARHORSE!  Well, why don’t they say that when the opera trots out Tosca or Madama Butterfly for the sixth consecutive season?  Truth is, once you get past the opening bars, this still is an incredible symphonic statement, with some of the tightest logical construction to be found in any composition anywhere.  Plus, we have maestro Claus Peter Flor leading a very individual and remarkable interpretation that will surprise you in many pleasant ways.

Interested?  Hope to see you there this weekend…

Tickets & Information

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For those of you who are not yet aware of it, there is a concert series up at the OHSU Auditorium on the OHSU campus on SW Sam Jackson Park Road.  It’s been around the last few years, but due to the location and not much of a budget for publicity, it hasn’t gained a lot of notoriety outside of the OHSU campus community.  The concerts take place at Noon, and most are on the third Wednesday of each month, October through April (though the next concert, featuring the Floristan Trio, is on a Friday).  The acoustics of the auditorium are lovely, and the concerts are informal, allowing for the medical staff and students to come and go as their schedules dictate.

The series is curated by pianist Susan Smith, and they’ve just made a website available with the full schedule and roster for the season.  You can find it here.

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Sam Bergman over at the Minnesota Orchestra has a great post about the apparent double standard between opera companies and symphony orchestras.  In brief: orchestras are constantly being berated for having structural deficits and are forced to produce more and more for-profit-like business models, while opera companies lose tremendous amounts of money on high-tech experiments and new opera commissions that run once and are never seen or heard again.

But from a fiscal perspective, it’s been written that the Met is actually losing untold millions on these simulcasts, and doesn’t really have a plan for making them financially sustainable in the future. Now, imagine that this were a symphony orchestra doing this – beaming their concerts all over creation and charging $25 a head for people packed into a theater in Las Vegas or Paris to watch us play. Then imagine that the New York Times found out that said orchestra was going to run a multi-million dollar deficit this season because of the cost of production. Can you imagine what the reaction would be?

I can. The orchestra would be roundly blasted by everyone from critics to consultants to its own board members for behaving as if money grows on trees, the simulcasts would most certainly be canceled immediately, a feeble plea for funding to save them would go out to the usual corporations and foundations, and in all likelihood, would fall on deaf ears because there’s a massive recession going on, donchaknow. And I can’t really say that this wouldn’t be a defensible reaction from all involved.

But because we’re talking about the opera world, none of this seems to happen. Opera (at least grand opera presented by large companies) seems to get a near-total pass from the folks who are constantly harping on orchestras for being clueless, elitist organizations who pay their musicians and conductors too much and can’t seem to make a budget sheet balance. Maybe it’s that our vision of opera is so bound up with images of opulence and wretched excess that it somehow seems okay for opera companies to shoot for the stars even when it’s dangerous from a bottom-line perspective.

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After our last classical series concert, the orchestra stayed for an extra 30 minutes to get an important job done: it was orchestra photo night.  Every few years, a new portrait of the orchestra and its music director is taken.  In virtually every other year, the photo is a standard, staid, and well, boring actually, affair.  The camera is up in the balcony, and the orchestra and conductor are on the stage, looking up at the camera.

This year, our PR director, Carl Herko, had a different idea (and one which has been sweeping around the orchestral world lately) – put the orchestra in the audience, give a view of the people that make up the orchestra by showing them off of the stage.  I haven’t seen any proofs from the photo shoot at the Oregon Symphony, but here’s an example of a similar photo done by the Concertgebouw Orchestra [click to enlarge]:

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Photo: Simon van Boxtel

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Nancy Ives/Photo © Charles Noble

I had the pleasure of venturing North into the wilds of Vancouver, Washington to hear Nancy Ives, principal cellist of the Oregon Symphony, perform the great Dvorak Cello Concerto with the Vancouver Symphony under the direction of Salvator Brotons.  I don’t really want to write a review, other than to say that Nancy played brilliantly, and the orchestra played well.  A few thoughts: the hall at Skyview High School is quite good.  Despite having only five basses, the bass response was very clear and forceful.  The sight lines were very good from our seats about four rows from the back of the auditorium.  It’s a good place to have a concert, and the VSO is lucky to have such a nice place to make their concert home.  The concert repeats Sunday evening at 7 p.m. – you can find details here.

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I’ve been working up a bunch of repertoire outside of the orchestra over the last several weeks, and it finally got to the stage where I had to commit to one of the most terrifying things a musician can do: I recorded myself.  If the average person is more terrified by the prospect of public speaking than death, then most musicians would rather be drawn and quartered than have to play into a recording device and then force themselves to listen to what they’ve wrought.  It’s much like actors who cannot stand to watch playbacks during shooting, or to see themselves up on the screen.  You see/hear (pretty much) only the worst of what is happening.  I’ve gone through the exercise of telling my students to come up with two positive feedback items for every one negative observation.  Sometimes it’s extremely difficult to come up with just one, but I remind myself that I’ve always had positive things to say about every musician I’ve ever heard play for me, so I can’t be the lone exception to this rule!

I have to admit that playing into a recording device (I keep wanting to say tape recorder, but I have one of those new-fangled Zoom H2 audio recorders that has no moving parts, it just records to an SD card) makes me almost as nervous as playing for fellow musicians, which is absolutely the worst, even if they (actually, especially if they) are your good friends.  So, anyway, I survived, and some things pleasantly surprised me while others reinforced misgivings that I already was forming.  And this is why recording one’s self is so important: it forces you to objectively assess your progress, and know where the subsequent work needs to be done, and where your remaining time needs to be spent.  There’s no substitute for it.  Unfortunately.

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Marilyn de Oliveira

We know that we’re lucky to have Marilyn de Oliveira join us as our new Assistant principal (or as one dubious friend of mine likes to say “ass prince”) cellist this season. She’s a vital and sensitive artist, but also brings a brilliant smile and equally brilliant wardrobe to the section as well. What’s more, she also brings back her husband, cellist Trevor Fitzpatrick, who was already in the OSO section, but on leave to be with her in San Antonio last season. I happened upon this review of a sort of farewell concert that she gave in San Antonio this past August, and it reaffirmed what a great coup we’ve achieved in gaining this wonderful cellist. I feel bad for San Antonio for losing Marilyn, but that’s tempered by our gain. [Read more →]

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Michael Tilson Thomas/Photo: G. Schirmer

If you missed the San Francisco Symphony’s wonderful exploration of four major works from the classical music repertoire (explicated and conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas) – then you’re in luck.  If you’re a digi-phile such as myself, you can click over to the iTunes Store and download each of the full episodes here [link will launch iTunes].  What’s more, they’re available for the amazing price of just $1.99 each or you can buy all four for $7.96!  A bargain for a very well-produced (and performed) series on great music.

For more information on the new season (which has begun on PBS October 15th), head on over to the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score website.

The programs available on iTunes are:

1. Beethoven’s Eroica
2. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
3. Copland and the American Sound
4. Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique

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Gustavo Dudamel’s opening night concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic will be broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances series Wednesday evening, October 21st, at 9:00 p.m.  Here in Portland, that will be KOPB.

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Kiril Gerstein, pianist

Tonight is the last of the three concerts making up the first of Classical Series B at the Oregon Symphony.  The program is a variation upon the famous “Three B’s” concert format – usually Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.  This time it’s Bach, Bernstein and Beethoven.  It pits two pieces by very well-known composers that are not performed as often as their other works against the mighty Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. [Read more →]

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I’ve been living with the new Kim Kashkashian recording entitled Neharót for some time now, and find its title track Neharót Neharót (by the Israeli composer Betty Olivero, b.1954) to be one of the most affecting new pieces of music that I’ve encountered in the past decade.  I liken its first impact on me to that of Jennifer Higdon’s Blue Cathedral, now one of the most-performed pieces of contemporary music in America – visceral, deeply touching, and subtly haunting.  Neharot stays with you for some time, not the least because it succeeds in transporting the listener to a place outside of their normal experience, and, I dare say, out of their time as well.  It’s a timeless piece of music.  Kashkashian also produces a remarkably vocal sound on her viola – an instrument which is often overlooked in favor of the cello for emulating the range of the human voice, but which I think takes the place in the register of a great mezzo – capable of stratospheric heights, but more at home in the middle-to-upper range and with subtle imperfections in the tone production that make the timbre reach more deeply into the heartstrings.  Speaking of voices, the Neharot features recorded voices of professional singers (singing songs of Kurdish and North African origin or derivation) which interplay with the solo viola.  The added layer that the orchestral figurations which open the work evolve into quotations from Orpheus’ lament from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo relates directly to the subtext of a people who have endured countless hardships and tragedies through years of civil war. The work, for solo viola, accordion, percussion, double string ensemble and tape, is the showpiece and emotional center of the recording, and on its merits alone justifies the purchase of the disc or download. [Read more →]

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