Today's Birthdays

Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745)
Franz [Ferenc] Doppler (1821-1883)
James Lockhart (1930-2025)
Derek Bourgeois (1941-2017)
Marin Alsop (1956)
Erkki-Sven Tüür (1959)
Dmitri Hvorostovsky (1962-2017)

and

Noah Webster (1758-1843)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
Günter Grass (1927-2015)
Thomas Lynch (1948)

And from the Writer's Almanac:

In 1882, during a tour across the US, Oscar Wilde lectured to coal miners in Leadville, Colorado, where he saw a sign on a saloon that said, "Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best," and called it "the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across."

Today's Birthdays

Bernhard Crusell (1775-1838)
Zdeněk Fibich (1850-1900)
Dag Wirén (1905-1985)
Harold Blumenfeld (1923-2014)
Karl Richter (1926-1981)
Barry McGuire (1935)
Suzanne Murphy (1941)
Peter Phillips (1953)

and

Virgil (70 B.C.E.- 19 B.C.E.)
Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)
Varian Fry (1907-1967)
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007)
Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Today's Birthdays

Alexander Zimlinsky (1871-1942)
Gary Graffman (1928-2025)
Rafael Puyana (1931-2013)
Enrico di Giuseppe (1932-2005)
La Monte (Thorton) Young (1935)
Sir Cliff Richard (1940)
Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023)

and

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
Katha Pollitt (1949)

Article-interview - violinist Anthea Kreston's new book Crescendo

My article about violinist Anthea Kreston has been published in Oregon Arts Wach here. Her life is very interesting, and you may end up reading her lively memoir.

Today's Birthdays

Art Tatum (1910-1956)
Hugo Weisgall (1912-1997)
Gustav Winckler (1925-1979)
Paul Simon (1941)
Leona Mitchell (1949)
Kristine Ciesinski (1950)
Melvyn Tan (1956)
Mark Applebaum (1967)

and

Conrad Richter (1890-1968)
Arna Bontemps (1902-1973)
Jamal Khashoggi (1958-2018)

Today's Birthdays

Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1686-1750)
Johann Ludwig Krebs (1713-1780)
Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Healey Willan (1880-1968)
Carlos López Buchardo (1881-1948)
Gilda Dalla Rizza (1892-1975)
Erich Gruenberg (1924-2020)
Pilar Lorengar (1938-1996)
Luciano Pavarotti (1935-2007)
Daryl Runswick (1946)
Penelope Walker (1956)
Chris Botti (1962)

and

Robert Fitzgerald (1910-1985)
Alice Childress (1916-1994)
Robert Coles (1929-2026)

Today's Birthdays

George Bridgetower (1780-1860)
Fernando De Lucia (1860-1925)
R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943)
Albert Stoessel (1894-1943)
Eugene Weigel (1910-1998)
Art Blakey (1919-1990)
David Rendall (1948)
Rachel Barton Pine (1974)

and

Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825)
Eleanor Roosevelt (1883-1962)
Elmore Leonard (1925-2013)

Today's Birthdays

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Vernon Duke (1903-1969)
Paul Creston (1906-1985)
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982)
Gloria Coates (1938-2023)
Sir Willard White (1946)
John Prine (1946-2020)
Steve Martland (1959)
Evgeny Kissin (1971)

and

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721)
Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

And from The Writer's Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, in Parafianovo, Belarus (1903). He was a talented classical musician, educated at an elite conservatory, but his family fled Russia after the revolution and he wound up playing piano in cafés in Constantinople (now Istanbul). From there, his family rode steerage class on a ship to America, went through Ellis Island, and ended up in New York in 1921. There the teenage Dukelsky met George Gershwin, who was only a few years older, and the two became good friends. Dukelsky played Gershwin what he described as “an extremely cerebral piano sonata,” and Gershwin, who was also trained in classical music, suggested this: “There’s no money in that kind of stuff, and no heart in it, either. Try to write some real popular tunes — and don’t be scared about going low-brow. They will open you up.” He also suggested that Dukelsky shorten his name, as he himself had done — Gershowitz to Gershwin. So Vladimir Dukelsky came up with the name Vernon Duke, but he didn’t use it for a while.

First, he went to Paris. There, he met and impressed the great ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Dukelsky wrote later about their first meeting — that Diaghilev had drawled: “‘Ah, a good-looking boy. That in itself is most unusual. Composers are seldom good-looking; neither Stravinsky nor Prokofiev ever won any beauty prizes. How old are you?’ I told him I was 20. ‘That’s encouraging, too. I don’t like young men over 25.’” And so Diaghilev commissioned him to write a ballet, and he wrote Zephire et Flore, with sets by Georges Braque, choreography by Léonide Massine, and costumes by Coco Chanel. It got a great reception, and Dukelsky was taken in by the not-quite-as-good-looking Stravinsky and Prokofiev. For a few years he divided his time between Paris, where he continued to write classical music, and London, where he wrote show tunes and used the name Vernon Duke. Then in 1929, he decided to go back to America, and he wrote some of the biggest hits of the 1930s — “April in Paris” (1932), “Autumn in New York” (1934), “I Can’t Get Started” (1936), and “Taking a Chance on Love” (1940). And he wrote the music for the Broadway show and film Cabin in the Sky (1940). By that time, he had become an American citizen and officially changed his name to Vernon Duke.

Today's Birthdays

Alexander Siloti (1863-1945)
Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954)
Carl Flesch (1873-1944)
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)
Roger Goeb (1914-1997)
Einojuhani Routavaara (1928-2016)
Alfons Kontarsky (1932-2010)
John Lennon (1940-1980)
Jackson Browne (1948)
Sally Burgess (1953)
Roberto Sierra (1953)

and

Ivo Andrić (1892-1975)
Bruce Catton (1899-1978)
Léopold (Sédar) Senghor (1906-2001)
Belva Plain (1915-2010)
Jill Ker Conway (1934-2018)
James Howe McClure (1939-2006)

Review of Oregon Symphony season opener in Oregon Arts Watch

 

The hometown band opened its season with an out-of-this-world performance of Jesse Montgomery's cello concerto, starring South African cellist Abel Selaocoe. I hope that you enjoy reading my review of the concert in Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672)
Louis Vierne (1870-1937)
Will Vodery (1885-1951)
Paul V. Yoder (1908-1990)
James Sample (1910-1995)
Kurt Redel (1918-2013)
Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
Johnny Ramone (1948-2004)
Robert Saxton (1953)
Carl Vine (1954)
Tabea Zimmermann (1968)
Bruno Mantovani (1974)

and

John Cowper Powys (1872-1963)
Walter Lord (1917-2002)
Philip Booth (1925-2007)
Jesse Jackson (1941)
R.L. Stine (1943)

Today's Birthdays

William Billings (1746-1800)
Joe Hill (1879-1915)
Shura Cherkassky (1911-1995)
Charles Dutoit (1936)
John Mellencamp (1951)
Yo-Yo Ma (1955)
Li Yundi (1982)

and

James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916)
Niels Bohr (1885-1962)
Helen Clark MacInnes (1907-1985)
Desmond Tutu (1931-2021)
Amiri Baraka (aka LeRoi Jones) (1934-2014)
Thomas Keneally (1935)
Dianne Ackerman (1948)
Sherman Alexie (1966)

Today's Birthdays

William Bradbury (1816-1868)
Jenny Lind (1820-1887)
Julia Culp (1880-1970)
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937)
Maria Jeritza (1887-1982)
Edwin Fischer (1886-1960)
Paul Badura-Skoda (1927-2019)
Dennis Wicks (1928-2003)
Udo Zimmermann (1943-2021)
Keith Lewis (1950)

and

Le Corbusier (1887-1965)
Caroline Gordon (1895-1981)

From the Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1600 that the opera Euridice was first performed, at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It is the oldest surviving opera.

Euridice was performed for the wedding celebrations of Henry IV of France and Maria de' Medici. It was written by Jacopo Peri, a beloved composer and singer. He had already written Dafne a few years earlier, which is considered to be the first opera, but that music has been lost.

Euridice is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the gifted musician Orpheus falls in love with the beautiful Eurydice, but just after their wedding she is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus is heartbroken, and he journeys to the underworld, to Hades, to try to bring her back. He charms the king of the underworld, also named Hades, and his wife, Persephone, and they agree to return Eurydice to Orpheus on one condition: that he get all the way back to the upper world without looking back to see if Eurydice is following. He almost makes it, but right as he is walking out into the sunlight he turns back, and Eurydice is still in the underworld, so he loses her forever. Peri not only wrote the opera, but he sang the role of Orpheus. The climax of the opera came during "Funeste piagge," or "Funeral shores," when Orpheus begs Hades and Persephone to release his beloved.

Peri wrote a long preface to Euridice, in which he explained the new musical form he was working in, which we now call opera. He said that he was trying to write the way he imagined the Greeks would have, combing music and speech into the ultimate form of drama. One of the people who came to Florence to see Euridice was Vincenzo Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua. And he probably brought his servant, Claudio Monteverdi. A few years later, in 1607, Monteverdi premiered his first opera, L'Orfeo, which was also a retelling of the legend of Orpheus. Monteverdi elevated the opera form to new heights, and L'Orfeo is considered the first truly great opera, with all of the dramatic orchestration and lyrics that are so central to the drama.

Today's Birthdays

Cyril Bradley Rootham (1875-1938)
Jürgen Jürgens (1925-1994)
John Downey (1927-2004)
Iwan Edwards (1937-2022)
Ken Noda (1962)

and

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Helen Churchill Candee (1858-1949)
Flann O’Brien (1911-1966)
Václav Havel (1936-2011)
Edward P. Jones (1950)
Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958)
Maya Ying Lin (1959)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1930, The New York Philharmonic begins its famous series of weekly Sunday afternoon national broadcasts with a program from Carnegie Hall conducted by Erich Kleiber. The first-ever radio broadcast of the New York Philharmonic had occurred on August 12, 1922, when a summer-time concert from Lewisohn Stadium conducted by Willem van Hoogstraten was relayed locally over WJZ in New York.

My note: Willem van Hoogstraten was the conductor of the Portland Symphony (former name of the Oregon Symphony) from 1925 to 1938.

Today's Birthdays

Fanny Tacchinardi‑Persiani (1812-1867)
Alain Daniélou (1907-1994)
Michael Steinberg (1928-2009) Alain Lombard (1940)
John Aler (1949-2022)
Fransico Araiza (1950)
Marc Minkowski (1962)
David Dzubay (1964)

and

Frederic Remington (1861-1909)
Damon Runyan (1880-1946)
Buster Keaton (1895-1966)
Brenden Gill (1914-1997)
Jackie Collins (1937-2015)
Roy Blount Jr. (1941)
Anne Rice (1941)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1921, the American Academy in Rome awards American composer Leo Sowerby its first two-year composition fellowship. American composer Howard Hanson was awarded the second two-year composition fellowship on November 9, 1921. The third fellowship was awarded to Randall Thompson on June 6, 1922. The fellowship awards continue to this day

Today's Birthdays

Antoine Dauvergne (1713-1797)
Stanisław Skrowaczewski (1923-2017)
Steve Reich (1936)
Shiela Silver (1946)

and

Emily Post (1873-1960)
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993)
Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

Today's Birthdays

Frantisek Tuma (1704-1774)
Henry Février (1875-1957)
Leroy Shield (1893-1962)
Francis Jackson (1917)
Mary Jeanne van Appledorn (1927-2014)
Kenneth Leighton (1929-1988)
Phill Niblock (1933-2024)
Michel Plasson (1933)
Peter Frankl (1935)
Ton Koopman (1944)
Jonathan Summers (1946)

and

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)
Graham Greene (1904-1991)
Jan Morris (1926-2020)

Todays Birthdays

J. Friedrich Eduard Sobolewski (1808-1872)
Henry Clay Work (1832-1884)
Paul Dukas (1865-1935)
Vladimir Horowitz (1904-1989)
Sylvano Bussotti (1931-2021)

and

Jimmy Carter (1924-2024)
Tim O'Brien (1946)

and from the Composers Datebook:

This day in 1924 marked the opening of The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, funded by a gift of $12.5 million from the American patroness Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who had inherited her fortune from the Curtis Publishing Company. The faculty, providing instruction for 203 students, included Leopold Stokowski and Josef Hofmann heading conducting and piano departments, respectively. Polish-born coloratura Marcella Sembrich. Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch. French-born harpist/composer Carlos Salzedo. and Italian composer Rosario Scalero.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Svendsen (1840-1911)
Sir Charles V. Stanford (1852-1924)
Václav Smetáček (1906-1986)
David Oistrakh (1908-1974)
Dame Julie Andrews (1935)
Johnny Mathis (1935)
Alan Hacker (1938-2012)
Jonathan Lloyd (1948)
Andrew Rindfleisch (1963)
David Danzmayr (1980)

and

W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)
Truman Capote (1924-1984)
Elie Wiesel (1928-2016)

Today's Birthdays

Jacques-Martin Hottetere (1674-1763)
Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska (1829/1834–1861)
Joaquin Nin (y Castellanos) (1879-1949)
Gene Autry (1907-1998)
Richard Bonynge (1930)
Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022)
Jean-Luc Ponty (1942)

and

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865)
Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954)

Article on Jesse Montgomery and her new cello concerto published in Oregon Arts Watch

My interview with Jesse Montgomery on her new and very unique cello concerto that the Oregon Symphony will play this weekend has been published by Oregon Arts Watch here. I hope that you enjoy reading it.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Mattheson (1681-1764)
Florent Schmitt (1870-1958)
Vivian Fine (1913-2000)
Rudolf Barshai (1924-2010)
Edward Applebaum (1937-2020)
Catherine Robbin (1950)
Michaela Comberti (1952-2003)

and

Confusius (551 BCE - 479 BCE)
Caravaggio (1571-1610)
Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923)
Edith Pargeter (1913-1995)
Simon Winchester (1944)

and

from the Composers Datebook

On this day in 1951, the Sci-fi classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still" opens in theaters across America, featuring memorable score by Bernard Herrmann that included eerie, other-worldly sounds imitating the electronic instrument known as a "Theremin" (after its Russian-born inventor, Leon Theremin). In the movie, actress Patricia Neal's rendition of the space alien command "Gort: Klaatu barada nikto" prevents Earth's destruction by a death-ray robot from outer space. Posted by Jam

Today's Birthdays

Cyril Scott (1879-1970)
Vincent Youmans (1898-1946)
Jean Berger (1909-2002)
James Wilson (1922-2005)
Igor Kipnis (1930-2002)
Dame Josephine Barstow (1940)
Misha Dichter (1945)
Chris Merritt (1952)
Dimitry Sitkovetsky (1954)
Peter Sellers (1957)

and

Sir William Empson (1906-1984)
Joyce Johnson (1935)
Kay Ryan (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Cyril Scott (1879-1970)
Vincent Youmans (1898-1946)
Jean Berger (1909-2002)
James Wilson (1922-2005)
Igor Kipnis (1930-2002)
Dame Josephine Barstow (1940)
Misha Dichter (1945)
Chris Merritt (1952)
Dimitry Sitkovetsky (1954)
Peter Sellers (1957)

and

Sir William Empson (1906-1984)
Joyce Johnson (1935)
Kay Ryan (1945)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Nikolaus Hanff (1663-1711)
Jean-Phillippe Rameau (1683-1764)
Léon Boëllmann (1862-1897)
Roberto Gerhard (1896-1970)
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
Sir Colin Davis (1927-2013)
Glenn Gould (1932-1982)
Gary Lakes (1950)
Stella Sung (1959)

and

William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)

Preview of Portland Piano International season in Oregon Arts Watch

My preview of PPI's 49th season has been published in Oregon Arts Watch here. I hope that you enjoy reading about the upcoming season, which is filed with a very strong lineup.

Today's Birthdays

Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929)
Sir Andrzej Panufnik (1914-1991)
Vaclav Nelhybel (1919-1996)
Cornell MacNeil (1922-2011)
John Rutter (1945)
Marc Neikrug (1946)

and

Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Eavan Boland (1944)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1947, German-born composer Hanns Eisler is questioned about his former membership in the Communist Party by the House Committee on Un-American activities. Eisler had been a member of the Party in the 1920s, left Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933, and had been working in Hollywood on film scores and as the musical assistant to Charlie Chaplin. He left the U.S. in 1948 and settled in East Germany - where he composed that country's national anthem.

Today's Birthdays

Jacques Féréol Mazas (1782-1849)
William Levi Dawson (1899-1990)
Jarmila Novotná (1907-1994)
Soulima Stravinsky (1910-1994)
Alexander Arutiunian (1920-2012)
Ray Charles (1930-2004)
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
Robert Helps (1928-2001)
Bruce Springsteen (1949)
William Shimell (1952)

and

Euripides (ca 480 BC - 406 BC) - today is the traditional day for Greeks to celebrate his birthday.
Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927)
Baroness Emmuska Orczy (1865-1947)
Walter Lippmann (1899-1974)
Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986)

Today's Birthdays

Arthur Pryor (1870-1942)
Mikolajus Ciurlionis (1875-1911)
Henryk Szeryng (1918-1988)
William O. Smith (1926-2020)
Hugh Bean (1929-2003)
Leonardo Balada (1933)
Anna Tomowa-Sintow (1941)
John Tomlinson (1946)
Vladmir Ghernov (1953)
Michael Torke (1961)

and

Fay Weldon (1931-2023)

Today's Birthdays

François Francoeur (1698-1787)
Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791)
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Meinrad Schütter (1910-2006)
Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)
Jill Gomez (1942)
Andrei Gavrilov (1955)
Nina Rautio (1957)

and

Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498)
Sir Edmund Gosse (1849-1928)
H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946)
Sir Allen Lane (1902-1970)
Stephen King (1941)

Today's Birthdays

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968)
Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton (1885-1941)
Uuno Klami (1900-1961)
David Sheinfeld (1906-2001)
John Dankworth (1927-2010)
Jane Manning (1938-2021)
Laurie Spiegel (1945)
John Harle (1956)

and

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968)
Maxwell Perkins (1884-1947)
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
Donald Hall (1928-2018)

Today's Birthdays

Gustav Schirmer (1829-1893)
Allan Pettersson (1911-1980)
Kurt Sanderling (1912-2011)
Blanche Thebom (1918-2010)
Arthur Wills (1926-2020)
Bonaventura Bottone (1950)

and

William Golding (1911-1993)
Amalia Hernández (1917-2000)
Roger Angell (1920-2022)

Today's Birthdays

Francesca Caccini (1587-1640)
Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748)
Henriette Renié (1875-1956)
Lord Berners (1883-1950)
Arthur Benjamin (1893-1960)
Josef Tal (1910-2008)
Norman Dinerstein (1937-1982)
Thomas Fulton (1949-1994)
John McGlinn (1953-2009)
Anna Netrebko (1971)

and

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault (1819-1868)
Paul Zimmer (1934)
Alberto Ríos (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Saverio Mercadante (1795-1870)
Vincenzo Tommasini (1878-1950)
Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920)
Isang Yun (1917-1995)
Hank Williams (1923-1953)
Vincent La Selva (1929-2017)

and

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Frank O'Connor (1903-1966)
Ken Kesey (1935-2001)

Today's Birthdays

Paul Taffanel (1844-1908)
Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)
Hans Swarowsky (1899-1975)
B. B. King (1925-2015)

and

John Gay (1685-1732)
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1950)
Elizabeth McCracken (1966)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1920, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso makes his last records (selections by Meyerbeer, Lully, Bartlett, and Rossini) for Victor Records in Camden, New Jersey. He would make his last operatic appearance at the old Metropolitan Opera House on Christmas Eve in 1920 (an evening performance of Halevy's "La Juive"), and die the following summer in Naples.

On this day in 1977, opera diva Maria Callas dies of a heart attack, age 53, in Paris.

Today's Birthdays

Horatio William Parker (1863-1919)
Bruno Walter (1876-1962)
Frank Martin (1890-1974)
Henry Brant (1913-2008)
Richard Arnell (1917-2009)
Cannonball Adderley (1928-1975)
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos (1933-2014)
Jessye Norman (1945-2019)
Richard Suart (1951)

and

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Robert Benchley (1899-1945)

Today's Birthdays

Michael Haydn (1737-1806)
Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
Vittorio Gui (1885-1972)
Alice Tully (1902-1993)
Lehman Engel (1910-1982)
Rolf Liebermann (1910-1999)
Martyn Hill (1944)
Raul Gimenez (1950)

and

Eric Bentley (1916-2020)
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1934-2002)
Renzo Piano (1937)

Today's Birthdays

Clara Schumann (1819-1896)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Bill Monroe (1911-1996)
Robert Ward (1917-2013)
Maurice Jarre (1924-2009)
Mel Tormé (1925-1999)
Nicolai Ghiaruv (1929-2004)
Werner Hollweg (1936-2007)
Arleen Auger (1939-1993)
Steve Kilbey (1954)
Andreas Staier (1955)

and

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
J.B. Priestley (1894-1984)
Roald Dahl (1916-1990)
Linda Colley (1949)

Today's Birthdays

Karl Doppler (1825-1900)
Herbert Lincoln Clarke (1867-1945)
Ernst Pepping (1901-1981)
Gideon Waldrop (1919-2000)
Tatiana Troyanos (1938-1993)
Phillip Ramey (1939)
Barry White (1944-2003)
John Mauceri (1945)
Vladimir Spivakov (1946)
Leslie Cheung (1956-2003)

and

H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
Alfred A. Knopf Sr. (1892-1984)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1910, Mahler's Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand") received its premiere in Munich, with the composer conducting.

Today's Birthdays

William Boyce (1711-1779)
Friedrich Kuhlau (1786-1832)
Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904)
Vally Weigl (1894-1982)
Harry Somers (1925-1999)
Arvo Pärt (1935)
Gianluigi Gelmetti (1945-2021)
Catherine Bott (1952)
Aaron Dworkin (1970)

and

O. Henry (1862-1910)
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Reed Whittemore (1919-2012)

Roundup of dance performances published in The Oregonian's Fall Arts Guide

The folks at the newspaper asked me to write a preview of upcoming dance shows. My recommendations were published in today's edition of The Oregonian here. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Today's Birthdays

Henry Purcell (1659-1695)
Niccolò Jommelli (1714-1774))
Tor Aulin (1866-1914))
Mikolajus Ciurlionis (1875-1911))
Judith Nelson (1939-2012))
Christopher Hogwood (1941-2014)
) Sir Thomas Allen (1944))
Michael Schønwandt (1953))
)
and)
)
Hanna Webster Foster (1758-1840))
Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961))
Franz Werfel (1890-1945))
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974))
Mary Oliver (1935-2019))
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

Today's Birthdays

Joan Cererols (1618-1680)
Edwin Lemare (1865-1934)
Edward Burlingame Hill (1872-1960)
James Blades (1901-1999)
Otis Redding (1941-1967)
Miriam Fried (1946)
David Rosenboom (1947)
Adam Fischer (1949)
Rachel Masters (1958)

and

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Paul Goodman (1911-1972)
Ivan Klíma (1931-2025)

Today's Birthdays

Nicolas de Grigny (1672-1703)
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)
Ninon Vallin (1886-1961)
Lionel Salter (1914-2000)
Christoph von Dohnányi (1929-2025)
Eric Salzman (1933-2017)
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016)
Dezső Ránki (1951)
Ilan Volkov (1976)

and

Wilhelm Raabe (1931-1910)
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
Grace Metalious (1924-1964)
Ann Beattie (1947)
Michael Schermer (1954)

Today's Birthdays

François Philidor (1726)
Joan Cross (1900-1993)
Sir Harry Secombe (1921-2001)
Arthur Ferrante (1921-2009)
Madeleine Dring (1923-1977)
Leonard Rosenman (1924-2008)
Hugh Aitken (1924-2012)
Sonny Rollins (1930-2026)
Buddy Holly (1936-1959)
Olly Wilson (1937-2018)
Jean-Yves Thibaudet (1961)
Angela Gheorghiu (1965)

and

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)
Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
Joe Klein (1946)
Jennifer Egan (1962)

Today's Birthdays

Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)
Sir Henry Walford Davies (1869-1941)
William Kraft (1923-2022)
Arthur Oldham (1926-2003)
Evgeny Svetlanov (1928-2002)
Joan Tower (1938)
Cynthia Haymon (1958)
Nigel Westlake (1958)
Detlev Glanert (1960)
Shih-Hui Chen (1962)

and

Fanny Wright (1795-1852)
Jane Addams (1860-1935)
Robert Pirsig (1928-2017)
Alice Sebold (1963)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864)
Amy Beach (1867-1944)
John Cage (1912-1993)
Peter Racine Fricker (1920-1990)
Karita Mattila (1960)
Marc-André Hamelin (1961)
Lars Vogt (1970)

and

Frank Yerby (1916-1991)
Justin Kaplan (1925-2014)
Ward Just (1935-2019)

Today's Birthdays

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Darius Milhaud (1892-1974)
Frederic Curzon (1899-1973)
Rudolf Schock (1915-1986)
Irwin Gage (1939-2018)
René Pape (1964)

and

Mary Renault (1905-1983)
Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Today's Birthdays

Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634)
Pietro Locatelli (1695-1764)
Marcel Grandjany (1891-1975)
Francesco Mignon (1897-1986)
Robert Thurston Dart (1921-1971)
Rudolf Kelterborn (1931-2021)
Valerie Coleman (1970)

and

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
Louis H. Sullivan (1852-1924)
Sally Benson (1897-1972)
Loren Eiseley (1907-1977)
Alison Lurie (1926-2020)
Loren Eiseley (1907-1977)
Malcolm Gladwell (1963)
Kiran Desai (1971)

Today's Birthdays

George Böhm (1661-1733)
Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921)
Dai-Keong Lee (1915-2005)
Laurindo Almeida (1917-1995)
David Blake (1936)
Greg A. Steinke (1942)
John Zorn (1953)
Paul Goodwin (1956)

and

Eugene Field (1850-1895)
Joseph Roth (1894-1939)
Grady Nutt (1934-1982)

Today's Birthdays

Emanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812)
Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)
Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957)
Conway Twitty (1933-1993)
Seiji Ozawa (1935-2024)
Júlia Várady (1941)
Leonard Slatkin (1944)
Reza Vali (1952)

and

Annie Ernaux (1940)

Today's Birthdays

Amicare Ponchielli (1834-1886)
Alma Mahler (1879-1964)
Everett Lee (1916-2022)
Ifor James (1931-2004)
Wieland Kuijken (1938)
Itzak Perlman (1945)
Daniel Harding (1975)

and

Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
William Shawn (1907-1992)
William Saroyan (1908-1981)
Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986)

Today's Birthdays

Ernesto Cavallini (1807-1874)
George Frederick Root (1820-1895)
Buddy Rich (1917-1987)
Regina Resnik (1922-2013)
David Maslanka (1943-1917)
David Schiff (1945)
Simon Bainbridge (1952)
Dimitris Sgouros (1969)

and

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)
R Crumb (1943)
Molly Ivins (1944-2007)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)
Helge Rosvaenge (1897-1972)
Charlie Parker (1920-1955)
Norman Platt (1920-2004)
Gilbert Amy (1936)
Anne Collins (1943-2009)
Lucia Valentini Terrani (1946-1998)
Michael Jackson (1958-2009)
Kevin Walczyk (1964)
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (1986)

and

John Locke (1632-1704)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894)
Karen Hesse (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Umberto Giordano (1867-1948)
Alfred Baldwin Sloane (1872-1925)
Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)
Karl Böhm (1894-1981)
Paul Henry Lang (1901-1991)
Richard Tucker (1913-1975)
John Shirley-Quirk (1931-2014)
Imogen Cooper (1949)

and

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
John Betjeman (1906-1984)
Rita Dove (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979)
Eric Coates (1886-1957)
Lester Young (1909-1959)
Maria Curcio (1918-2009)
Barry Conyngham (1944)
Ann Murray (1949)
Sian Edwards (1959)

and

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
C. S. Forester (1899-1966)
Ira Levin (1929-2007)
William Least Heat-Moon (1939)

Today's Birthdays

Willem de Fesch (1687-1761)
Luis Delgadillio (1887-1961)
Arthur Loesser (1894-1969)
Humphrey Searle (1915-1981)
Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)
Nicholas Braithwaite (1939)
Sally Beamish (1956)
Branford Marsalis (1960)

and

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)
Lee de Forest (1873-1961)
Mother Teresa (1910-1997)
Julio Cortázar (1914-1984)
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941)

Today's Birthdays

Robert Stolz (1880-1975)
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972)
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)
Wayne Shorter (1933-2023)
José Van Dam (1940)
Keith Tippett (1947)
Elvis Costello (1954)

and

Brian Moore (1921-1999)
Charles Wright (1935)
Martin Amis (1949-2023)

Today's Birthdays

Alessandro Marcello (1669-1747)
Théodore Dubois (1837-1924)
Bernhard Heiden (1910-2000)
Niels Viggo Bentzon (1919-2000)
Stephen Paulus (1949-2014)
Carlo Curley (1952-2012)

and

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Susan Sheehan (1937)
Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013)
John Green (1977)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1456 that the first edition of the Gutenberg Bible was bound and completed in Mainz, Germany. The Gutenberg Bible was the first complete book printed with movable type. The press produced 180 copies of the Bible. Books had been printed on presses before, in China and Korea, with wood and bronze type; but Gutenberg used metal type, and made a press that could print many versions of the same text quickly. His contributions to printing were huge: he created an oil-based printing ink, he figured out how to cast individual pieces of type in metal so that they could be reused, and he designed a functioning printing press. But others before him had come up with similar ideas. Probably the most important thing that Gutenberg did was to develop the entire process of printing — he streamlined a system for assembling the type into a full book and then folding the pages into folios, which were then bound into an entire volume — and to do it all quickly. The techniques that Gutenberg refined were used for hundreds of years, and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible marked a turning point in the availability of knowledge to regular people.

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1968, Czech conductor and composer Rafael Kubelik launches an appeal to world musicians to boycott performances in the five nations which invaded Czechoslovakia on August 20-21 until their military forces evacuate the country. The appeal was joined by Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Rubinstein, Yehudi Menuhin, Otto Klemperer, Bernard Haitink, Claudio Arrau, and others.

Today's Birthdays

Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925)
Ernst Krenek (1900-1991)
William Primrose (1903-1982)
Constant Lambert (1905-1951)
Carl Dolmetsch (1911-1977)
Mark Russell (1932-2023)
Antônio Meneses (1957-2024)
Brad Mehldau (1970)

and

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1934, the Berkshire Symphonic Festival in was founded in Stockbridge, Mass., by American composer and conductor Henry Hadley, with the participation of the New York Philharmonic. The Festival later became associated with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky. PS from James: in 1936 this festival moved to Lenox, Mass. where it was renamed the Tangelwood Festival.

Today's Birthdays

Josef Strauss (1827-1870)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Maud Powell (1867-1920)
John Lee Hooker (1917-2001)
Ivry Gitlis (1922-2020)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007)
Peter Hoffmann (1944-2010)
Tori Amos (1963)

and

Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)
Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)
Annie Proulx (1935)

Today's Birthdays

Lili Boulanger (1893-1918)
Count (William) Basie (1904-1984)
Tommy Reilly (1919-2000)
Willhelm Killmayer (1927-2017)
Gregg Smith (1931-2016)
Dame Janet Baker (1933)

and

X. J. Kennedy (1929-2026)
Robert Stone (1937-2015)
Ellen Hinsey (1960)

Today's Birthdays

Jacopo Peri (1561-1633)
Mario Bernardi (1930-2013)
Dame Anne Evans (1941)
Maxim Vengerov (1974)

and

Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950)
Paul Tillich (1886-1965)
H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Eero Saarinen (1910-1961)
Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974)
Heather McHugh (1948)

Today's Birthdays

William Henry Fry (1881-1864)
Georges Enescu (1881-1955)
Allan Monk (1942)
Gerard Schwarz (1947)
Rebecca Evans (1963)

and

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
Ogden Nash (1902-1971)
Frank McCourt (1930-2009)
Joe Frank (Langemann) (1938-2018)

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825)
Benjamin Godard (1849-1895)
Basil Cameron (1884-1975)
Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973)
Dame Moura Lympany (1916-2005)
Goff Richards (1944-2011)
Tan Dun (1957)

and

Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809)
Margaret Murie (1902 -2003)
Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008)

and from The Writer's Almanac

Italian-born Viennese composer Antonio Salieri was born in Legnago, in the Republic of Venice (1750). Although he was quite popular in the 18th century, he probably wouldn't be well known today were it not for the movie Amadeus (1984). The movie was based on Peter Shaffer's play by the same name (1979), which was in turn based on a short play by Aleksandr Pushkin, which was called Mozart and Salieri (1830). These stories all present Salieri as a mediocre and uninspired composer who was jealous of Mozart's musical genius; Salieri tried to discredit Mozart at every turn, and some versions of the story even accuse him of poisoning his rival.

But Salieri was a talented and successful composer, writing the scores for several popular operas. He had a happy home life with his wife and eight children. And because he had received free voice and composition lessons from a generous mentor as a young man, he also gave most of his students the benefit of free instruction. Some of his pupils included Beethoven, Franz Liszt, and Franz Schubert. He was the Kapellmeister — the person in charge of music — for the Austrian emperor for 36 years. He and Mozart were competitors, but their rivalry was usually a friendly one; Salieri visited Mozart when he was dying, and was one of the few people to attend his funeral.

After the turn of the 19th century, Salieri's music began to fall out of fashion. "I realized that musical taste was gradually changing in a manner completely contrary to that of my own times," he wrote. "Eccentricity and confusion of genres replaced reasoned and masterful simplicity." He stopped composing operas and began to produce more and more religious pieces. He suffered from dementia late in his life and died in 1825. He had composed his own requiem 20 years earlier, and it was performed for the first time at his funeral.

Today's Birthdays

Henri Tomasi (1901-1971)
Abram Chasins (1903-1987)
George Melly (1926-2007)
T.J. (Thomas Jefferson) Anderson (1928)
Edward Cowie (1943)
Jean-Bernard Pommier (1944)
Heiner Goebbels (1952)
Artur Pizarro (1968)

and

Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878-1957)
Mae West (1893-1980)
Evan S. Connell (1924-2013)
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018)
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Jonathan Franzen (1959)

and from the Writer's Almanac:

On this date in 1982, the first compact discs for commercial release were manufactured in Germany. CDs were originally designed to store and play back sound recordings, but later were modified to store data. The first test disc, which was pressed near Hannover, Germany, contained a recording of Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony, played by the Berlin Philharmonic. The first CD commercially produced at the new factory and sold on this date was ABBA's 1981 album The Visitors; the first new album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, which hit the stores in Japan — alongside the new Sony CD player — on October 1. The event is known as the "Big Bang of digital audio."

Today's Birthdays

Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861)
Gabriel Pierné (1863-1937)
Jacinto Guerrero (1895-1951)
Ralph Downes (1904-1993)
Bill Evans (1929-1980)
Franz Welser-Möst (1960)

and

Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749)
Tina Modotti (1896-1942)
William Maxwell (1908-2000)
Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Today's Birthdays

Hutschenruyter (1859-1943)
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
Albert Spalding (1888-1953)
Jaques Ibert (1890-1952)
Leon Theremin (1896-1993)
Lukas Foss (1922-2009)
Aldo Ciccolini (1925-2015)
Oscar Peterson (1925-2007)
Rita Hunter (1933-2001)
Anne Marie Owens (1955)
James O'Donnell (1961)

and

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
Edna Ferber (1885-1968)
T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935)
Julia Child (1912-2004)
Benedict Kiely (1919-2007)
Denise Chávez (1948)
Stieg Larsson (1954)

and

The Woodstock music festival began on this day in 1969.

2026 Vancouver Arts and Crafts Festival - Part II

Pinchas Zuckerman and Gerard Schwarz - Photo by Paul Quackenbush

Legendary violinist Pinchas Zuckerman headlined the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s concert on the second night of the festival (August 8), delivering an outstanding performance of Max Bruch’s “Violin Concert No. 1 in g minor.” But Zuckerman did under a bit of duress, because the flight that was scheduled to bring him to the Pacific Northwest on the day before was canceled. So, he caught a planee that brought him to Vancouver on the afternoon of the performance. Consequently, the orchestra, under guest conductor Gerard Schwarz, who was the music director of the Seattle Symphony for many years, went on stage that evening without the benefit of a rehearsal.

No matter! Zuckerman, playing from memory, sailed through the concerto as if he had played it a million times. Well, in Zuckerman’s case, he has played the Bruch countless times and knows it like the back of his hand. Yet, he has a way to make it sound fresh and appealing so that the lyrical passages came across smooth as silk, the many runs had vigor and sounded clear and crisp. He made his instrument sing, and it the result was just as spectacular as anyone could image.

Guided by Schwarz, the orchestra supported Zuckerman superbly. With Zuckerman in the spotlight, the concerto resonated with the audience, which followed along with rapt attention and, after the finale, responded to the performance with a standing ovation that was loud and long.

Zuckerman played an encore, the “Berceuse Sfaradite” by Paul Ben-Haim. He perfectly expressed its lullaby-like style, ending it wistfully with a very high note that faded into the summer night air. That resulted in another sustained standing ovation.

For the second half of the concert, Schwarz led the orchestra in a fine performance of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The weather was a bit windier than the previous night and that might have contributed to a couple of exposed notes to go awry in the orchestra. But on the whole, the musical forces, urged on by Schwarz, played with verve. Because there were no program notes, supertitles for the movements (10 in all) would have been helpful. Of course, concertgoers could consult their phones to get the lowdown on the music if they had wished, since there’s plenty of information available on the internet.

With the orchestra going full tilt to convey the majestic Great Gate of Kiev in the final movement, the concert ended on a high note, resulting in a standing ovation, So everyone home went home in high spirits.

VAMF continued the next evening with Gerard Schwarz conducting and his son Julian Schwarz playing Arthur Foote’s “Cello Concerto” and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with pianist Shelly Berg.

Today's Birthdays

Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-1876)
Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988)
Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1955)
Jan Koetsier (1911-2006)
Ferruccio Tagliavini (1913-1995)
Georges Prêtre (1924-2017)
Yuri Kholopov (1932-2003)
Sarah Brightman (1960)
Cecilia Gasdia (1960)
Beata Moon (1969)

and

Ernest Thayer (1863-1940)
John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
Russell Baker (1925-2019)
Danielle Steel (1947)
Gary Larson (1950)

2026 Vancouver Arts and Music Festival - Part 1

Photo by Paul Quackenbush

Now in its fourth year, the Vancouver Arts and Music Festival has become a much-anticipated summer event, drawing thousands to the city’s downtown - as it did again on August 7 - for a weekend of fun. Anchoring the festival is the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which takes over a large portion of Esher Short Park by harnessing a very large portable stage to the bandshell for live concerts every evening. A very large sound system amplifies the orchestra so that all of the concertgoers, who are spread out over the lawn, can enjoy the music.

A bit of background: the VSO – through the foresight of its President/CEO and Principal Clarinetist, Igor Shakhman – received $600,00 from the Murdock Charitable Trust and other foundations to launch the festival in the summer of 2023. The funds helped to create a huge event that shows off the metro area’s arts, crafts, culinary, and cultural talents. Now the city of Vancouver and companies that are based there have jumped on the bandwagon to make sure that the VAMF continues into the future.

In her welcoming remarks to the overflow crowd at the opening this year’s festival, Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle jokingly took credit for the improved air quality. During the week leading up to the festival, the city had been blanketed with a smokey haze that came from wildfires, which had spread throughout Pacific Northwest.

The cleaner air helped to bring out another large audience, which was in a good mood and ready for an evening of music with the hometown band under its Music Director Salvador Brotons. The program focused on pieces that were made famous by "Fantasia," the iconic 1940 Disney movie that highlighted the antics of Mickey Mouse with popular pieces from the classical music repertoire.

The concert began with J. S. Bach’s “Toccata and Fuge in D minor” in an arrangement for orchestra by Leopold Stokowski, who led the Philadelphia Orchestra (1912-1938). The orchestra captured the spirit of the piece, but the woodwinds sounded a little weak at times, including a contrabassoon that sounded almost guttural. the outdoor venue and ambient noise from planes, motorcycles, trains, firetrucks and food trucks. Still, Brotons, got his forces to create a sweeping fortissimo to make a grand finale.

The orchestra evoked Mickey Mouse’s mischief with an energetic performance of Paul Dukas’ “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Again, there was a bit of sonic competition from the surrounding area and a plane overhead might have contributed to the sound of the trumpet getting buried at the climactic moment near the end of the piece.

The “Polovetsian Dances” from Alexander Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” swirled with elan, seesawing between the elegant and lovely dances for the maidens – familiar to many listeners because of the “Stranger in Paradise” tune from the musical “Kismet”– and the rough and boisterous dances for the boys and men. It would be great to hear this piece done with singers to get the full effect some day in the future.

After intermission, the orchestra returned to its Fantasia-inspired theme by playing Modest Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,” and gave it a lively account so that even the quietest passages could be heard. That piece contrasted well with the delicate “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera “La Gioconda.” The tune was instantly recognizable to listeners of a certain age who can recall Allen Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!,” which put a smile on a lot of faces.

The brass sections really got to strut their stuff and delivered all of the goods with a rousing rendition of John Williams “Star Wars Suite.” It revved up the audience and sent everyone home in a good mood. Some did stay a bit longer so that they could watch a “Fantasia” on a large screen in another part of the park. That was a nice way to wrap things up.

Today's Birthdays

Sir George Grove (1820-1900)
John Ireland (1879-1962)
Luis Mariano (1914-1970)
George Shearing (1919-2011)
Louis Frémaux (1921-2017)
Don Ho (1930-2007)
Sheila Armstrong (1942)
Kathleen Battle (1948)
Gregory Vajda (1973)

and

Nikolaus Lenau (1802-1850)
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690)
Heinrich Biber (1644-1704)
Katherine Lee Bates (1859-1929)
Porter Wagoner (1927-2007)
Buck Owens (1929-2006)
Huguette Tourangeau (1940)
David Munrow (1942-1976)
Pat Metheny (1954)
Stuart MacRae (1976)

and

Robert Southey (1773-1843)
Edith Hamilton (1867-1963)
Cecil B. DeMille (1881-1959)
Donald Justice (1925-2004)
William Goldman (1931-2018)
Anthony Swofford (1970)

Today's Birthdays

J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)
Ginette Neveu (1919-1949)
Raymond Leppard (1927-2019)
Alun Hoddinott (1929-2008)
Tamás Vásáry (1933)

and

Louise Brogan (1897-1970)
Alex Haley (1921-1992)
Mavis Gallant (1922-2014)
Andre Dubus (1936-1999)

Today's Birthdays

Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936)
Douglas Moore (1893-1969)
Leo Fender (1909-1991)
Marie-Claire Alain (1926-2013)
Edwin Carr (1926-2003)
John Aldis (1929-2010)
Alexander Goehr (1932)
Giya Kancheli (1935-2019)
Bobby Hatfield (1940-2003)
Dmitri Alexeev (1947)
Eliot Fisk (1954)

and

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)
Joyce Sutphen (1949)
Mark Doty (1953)
Suzanne Collins (1962)

Today's Birthdays

Michael Umlauff (1781-1842)
Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947)
Albert William Ketèlbey (1875-1959)
Solomon Cutner (1902-1988)
Ann Brown (1912-2009)

and

Izaak Walton (1593-1683)
John Dryden (1631-1700)
P. L. Travers (1899-1966)
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

and from The Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1928, Australian-born American composer Percy Grainger marries Swedish poet and painter Ella Viola Strom at the Hollywood Bowl in front of an audience of 22,000 concert-goers. Grainger conducted the LA Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of his "To a Nordic Princess," dedicated to his bride.

Today's Birthdays

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944)
Adolf Busch (1891-1952)
André Jolivet (1905-1974)
Benny Carter (1907-2003)
Josef Suk (1929-2011) - violinist
Jacques Hétu (1938-2010)

and

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953)
Valerie Sayers (1952)
Elizabeth Tallent (1954)

Today's Birthdays

Henry Litolff (1818-1891)
Sir Granville Bantock (1868-1946)
Karel Husa (1921-1916)
Felice Bryant (1925-2003)
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1936-1977)
Garrison Keillor (1942)
Ian Hobson (1952)
Sharon Isbin (1956)
Christian Altenburger (1957)

Review of Santa Fe Desert Chorale Summer Festival published in Classical Voice North America

Last weekend I heard the Santa Fe Desert Chorale give three superb concerts. My review of their performances has been posted in Classical Voice North America here.

Today's Birthdays

Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677)
Mary Carr Moore (1873-1957)
Karl Ulrich Schnabel (1909-2001)
Udo Reinemann (1942-2013)

and

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Talking with trumpet whiz Jeffrey Work about his new album - in Oregon Arts Watch

My interview with Jeff Work and his new recording has been posted on Oregon Arts Watch here.  I hope that you enjoy reading it.

Today's Birthday

Marc Antonio Cesti (1623-1669)
Leonardo Leo (1694-1744)
Ambroise Thomas (1811-1896)
Hans Gál (1890-1987)
Erich Kleiber (1890-1956)
Betsy Jolas (1926)
Stoika Milanova (1945)
Mark O'Connor (1961)

and

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)
Wendell Berry (1934)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1978, the citizens of Patowan, Utah, decided to name a local mountain Mr. Messiaen, in honor of the French composer, Olivier Messiaen, who spent a month in Utah in 1973 an composed a symphonic work, "Des canyons aux etoiles" (From the canyons to the stars), which glorified the natural beauty of the region.

Today's Birthdays

Henry Berger (1844-1929)
Italo Montemezzi (1875-1952)
Albert W. Ketèlbey (1875-1959)
Louie "Satchmo" Armstrong (1901-1971)
William Schuman (1910-1992)
David Raksin (1912-2004)
Arthur Butterworth (1923-2014)
Jess Thomas (1927-1993)
David Bedford (1937-2011)
Simon Preston (1938-2022)
Deborah Voigt (1960)
Olga Neuwirth (1968)

and

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Raoul Wallenberg (1912-1947?)
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Helen Thomas (1920-2013)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1705, in Arnstadt, J.S. Bach and a bassoonist named Johann Heinrich Geyersbach cross paths late at night and an argument ensues. Geyerbach threatens Bach with a stick and Bach draws his sword. Both are hauled up before the city magistrate and reprimanded for their behavior.

Today's Birthdays

Louis Gruenberg (1884-1964)
Antonio Lauro (1917-1986)
Tony Bennett (1926-2023)
James Tyler (1940-2010)
Simon Keenlyside (1959)

and

Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885)
Ernie Pyle (1900-1944)
P. D. James (1920-2014)
Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)
Marvin Bell (1937-2020)
Diane Wakoski (1937)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this date in 1668, German composer Dietrich Buxtehude marries the daughter of Franz Tunder, retiring organist at St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, as a condition to succeed Tunder in his position at St. Mary's. Years later, Buxtehude offered his position in Lübeck with a similar caveat that the new organist must marry his daughter. It is thought that both Handel and J.S. Bach were both interested in the position - but not in Buxtehude's daughter.

Today's Birthdays

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975)
Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-1963)
Marvin David Levy (1932-2015)
Anthony Payne (1936-2021)
Gundula Janowitz (1937)
Richard Einhorn (1952)
Angel Lam (1978)

and

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933)
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Isabel Allende (1942)

Today's Birthdays

Francis Scott Key (1779-1843)
Hans Rott (1858-1884)
Morris Stoloff (1898-1980)
William Steinberg (1899-1978)
Jerome Moross (1913-1983)
Lionel Bart (1930-1999)
Nico Castel (1931-2015)
Ramblin' Jack Elliott (1931)
Jordi Savall (1941)
André Gagnon (1942)
Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)

and

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Ernst Jandl (1925-2000)
Madison Smartt Bell (1957)

Kai Frueh's Bird Concert: Intimacy and understanding borne of a lifetime filled with the love of birds.

Prelude: Birds, and A Journey

When I headed over the Coast Range with my ultimate destination being the Seven Capes Bird Alliance’s Lincoln City Osprey Days where Kai Frueh (rhymes with 'Fly Free') would be performing his aptly named 'Bird Concert,' I of course took a predictable detour to see birds along the way. I also have a touch of wanderlust, so I decided to take a (relative) back road, one down which I had never driven. Oregon State Highway 223 runs between Dallas and Wren along the foot of the Coast Range, and why would I not go to a town called Wren? Also known as the King’s Valley Highway, this struck me as a sad misnomer, winding as it did amongst tall hills long bereft of crown, topped either by woeful, bald pate clearcuts or the unnaturally thick clutter of the tree farms that have replaced the vast majority of ancient woodlands along the Coast Range.

Still, it had its moments of beauty here and there, as all roads in Oregon do. I saw a Turkey Vulture soaring, and a roadside Raven, and heard Swainson’s Thrush and Black-capped Chickadees sing at Beazell Memorial Forest. This could have served as a memorial to the forest, but still. Birds find a way.

When I got over the hump the bright sun turned into dense fog (surprise surprise); almost as soon as I crested the Coast Range a thick peasouper set in.  I’d timed it so that I would arrive at Yaquina Bay in Newport just after low tide; as the tide comes in, it pushes the gulls and shorebirds closer to land for easier viewing, and the incoming tide draws in more seabirds as well. I was sure I wouldn’t be able to see anything but it turned out to be a curious fog; it seemed to bottom out at an altitude of a couple hundred feet: I could barely see a car-length ahead of me atop the Yaquina Bay Bridge, but it was clear as a bell when I got down to sea level; I could see the entire bay perfectly, the thick gray fog a subtly rolling ceiling just overhead. 

Later I spotted Kai in the parking lot right as I pulled into the Lincoln City Cultural Center. He came up to the car munching a pre-performance snack, and when I told him I was taking a few minutes to relax before the concert since I’d just rolled straight in from a long day of travel and birding, he nodded.  “Yep, that’s how it goes. You get any year birds?” he asked, referring to any new birds that I hadn’t seen yet this year.  “There were a couple of Bonaparte’s Gulls, and like six Hudsonian Whimbrel at Yaquina Bay,” I said, and he seemed interested. (Amongst a lot of other birding the following day, including leading a bird walk for the Osprey Days, Kai went out and spotted that pair of Bonies, along with 47 Whimbrel at the same spot.)

Immature California (L) and Heerman's Gulls
Newport, OR July 10 2026
Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

The Lincoln City Cultural Center, as I realized when I pulled in, is separated from Devil’s lake by a only small woody patch;  Devil’s Lake is where I first became a birder, so this area holds a special, almost sacred place in my heart.  As Kai went in to prep for the concert I sat with the windows open, a chorus of gull calls filling the air. I love gulls—they’re so comfortable around humans. Earlier I’d sat amongst a mixed flock of them at the South Jetty in Newport, photographing Western, California, Glaucous-winged, hybrid Olympics and even a smoky brown juvenile Heerman’s. However much I love the solitude, being on the road can be lonely, but somehow I always feel at home among gulls, bold and shifty, always looking to get over and always just owning the place wherever they happen to be.

I made my way past the immense octopus on my way in; giant sea creatures seem to be a theme for me lately in my concert-going; this octopus fit right in with the Goblin Shark I’d seen earlier this year at New Wave Opera’s performance of Deep Water.  Once inside I finally got to meet Dawn Villascuesa, president of Seven Capes Bird Alliance and an uber-volunteer for the Oregon Birding Association for many years; she was the night’s MC, and I’d long wanted to thank her personally for all her service to the OBA.

Giant Octopus. Lincoln City, OR.
Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

Kai’s Bird Concert

 The hall was packed almost full as Kai took the stage; there was a large screen behind him as he sat at the grand piano. [NOTE: Kai talked in depth about all these compositionsin our interview on July 5; you can read it here.] He opened with Amy Beach’s 1921 composition Hermit Thrush at Morn Op 72. No. 2. This bird is well-known to Oregonians; its beautiful, ethereal fluting, which spirals upward into silence, graces much of the state in the spring. Beach’s waltz-like treatment of the song, bursting with extensive, lush ornamentation, starts simply: a held note and then a twittering and building into a brief glorious explosion of intensity worthy of Chopin. Kai’s intimate knowledge of bird vocalizations showed; the ornaments could have been tossed away like so much fluff, but instead he painted a human being’s representation of this glorious bird’s song as fully as it can be rendered on a human instrument.

Nickerson Beach by Brad Balliett (2025) is, in the composer’s own words, “a tone poem for solo piano depicting a bright, breezy morning in late June on the south shore of Long Island, an important nesting location for many migratory birds. Against a backdrop of transparent sunshine and a kaleidoscope of bright, blue waves, the cries of teeming nesting birds can be heard: gulls, terns, oystercatchers, skimmers, plovers, and songbirds.” 

Black Skimmer, TX. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

The screen behind Kai lit up with some truly excellent video of many species of birds on sandy beaches as the piano-poet accompanied them. Common Terns harassed Black Skimmers (a crazy bird that skims the water for fish with a lower mandible almost half-again-as-long as the upper) as dense-yet-sweet cluster chords thrummed away on the piano. Cute and fuzzy Piping Plover chicks were interspersed therein; by watching the performer I could tell that he was paying close attention to the video, no doubt so as to properly time the correct motif with the proper birds. A new theme of hammered chords, all high in the register, exploded when the first American Oystercatcher appeared. Mysterious tinkling accompanied a slow-motion shot of a pair of terns walking with a fish held tightly in beaks. A forceful single-note plinking accompanied a baby tern wolfing down something disgusting that was no doubt delicious; this moody piece, by turns serious and humorous, sweet and ominous, was a surprising yet completely fitting way to render this snapshot of the lives of birds on the shore.  A singing Northern Yellow Warbler closed out this work with a brief, curiously gentle tinkling coda.

American Oystercatcher. Photo: Kai Frueh

The first of two works by Oregon composer, conservationistand motorless birder Thomas Meinzen was up next.. Remnants is an ode of sorts to the “fractured grassland and prairie ecosystems which are disappearing at a rapid rate across North America,” said Frueh, mentioning that these birds and ecosystems are a special love of his. Free-flowing and sibilant, Frueh’s interpretation was sentimental, and one could feel that love, from both composer and performer—a vibrant love, yet one tinged with sadness. But hope was there, as well as joy, in the form of big, fearless crescendi as Meadowlarks sang, sounding as though they were in the very room.

Like an expert fromager pairing fancy cheeses and wines, Frueh chose some of his own recordings of Garden Warbler and EurasianBlackcap to go with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux. Frueh demonstrated a nice touch for the Baroque, his clean, singing left-hand deftly executing tricky mordents, integrating them into the texture, and his attack was fearless and smooth as he launched into a long section featuring a dizzying array of ornamentation.

At the opening of Ravel’s Oiseaux Tristes Frueh paused for a moment, making sure that the audience heard the introductory birdsong before beginning. His respect for the birds permeated the program—this was not a gimmick of some kind. He displayed a sensitive light touch, yet with firm control; his repeated left-hand crossovers to gently kiss a single note were heady and moving.

Batitú, by Argentinian composer Julia Tchira was an arresting, engrossing work. According to Frueh, “this piece imagines the migration of Upland Sandpiper from Wisconsin, where I was studying at the time, to Argentina where she’s from, and back to the U.S. and in this way it kind of connected us. The piece draws on "deep listening," a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. It’s about being aware of every sound in the environment—this is the only piece played without recordings or multimedia; it features moments of silence to make the listener aware of the acoustic environment.”  This deep listening is about being in tune with all sounds around us, not just the ones we want to hear; performer and audience were instructed to incorporate the extant sound world into their experience.

The hum of the air conditioner and the scratch of my pen on the page, the squeak of a chair and the rustling of fabric on an uncrossing leg accompanied a gentle, rocking tremolando high on the keyboard. The long, fraught silences in the work were filled with meaning. Listening with this viewpoint in mind, even that most-dreaded of sounds at any concert…the loud crinkling of a cellophane cough drop wrapper that someone always manages to unwrap during the quietest moment of any given concert, dragging it out in a useless attempt to be less intrusive, thereby prolonging the torture instead of just getting it over with all at once, yes, that sound too was present in this concert, but in an effort not to judge sounds, to instead incorporate it into the experience, it lost its aggravating quality (Well…almost. I did my best.)

Kai Frueh

Tonally the work was very accessible; gentle, ascending chordal motives were followed by a crisp descending 2-handed scale. There was a distant boom at what felt like a shifting meter, and though there were no recordings used as part of the work, birds were still there: the barely audible song of a White-crowned Sparrow that had been singing non-stop since I arrived in the parking lot was still present, and the gulls were still crying. Angular melodic leaps sprinkled with acciaccature, a tremolo basso and more tender chord works, and then the work ended with a fading repeated note, and a long silence…but it wasn’t really silence now, was it?

Kai’s brother Ben Frueh joined on violin for the performance of Meinzen’s second composition of the evening, Headland [see embedded video below], which is about the Oregon Coast. The recording opened with that most ancient of sounds, the low susurrus of surf, and accompanying it the long call of a gull. Wrentits sang their bouncy ball song, where they were joined by the live White-crowned Sparrow, singing loudly now outside the performance hall. A skipping and sighing violin was accompanied by peripatetic piano which morphed into a joyful dance, evoking in me any number of playful images…sea lions gamboling in the surf and waves splashing life into a rocky tidepool, briny water washing the bright tentacles of multi-colored sea anemone back and forth. Then the music slowly turned back to mysterioso at the startling shriek of a Raven. A Bald Eagle, and the tick-tick-ticking of Red Crossbills overlay a sentimental duet as the brothers traded phrases. More folksy fiddling and block chord movement as the dance returned, but it turned more serious as the eagle cried once more and the violin slowly slid into the surf.

The program closed with Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve, our phantomic whistler returning once again. Its strange, graceful modality was a perfect coda, and Frueh infused it with joy, playing Beach’s transcriptions of this amazing bird’s song with an intimacy and understanding that could only be borne of a lifetime filled with a love of birds.

Epilogue: Remnants of a Grassland

I saw more year birds the following day as I moved north up the coast and toward home; a Red-necked Grebe floated among the swells as a flight of Black Oystercatchers chattered over the pounding surf at the Devil’s Punchbowl near Newport; a pair of punk-rock Tufted Puffins were joined by well over a thousand of their alcid brethren, Common Murres, atop iconic Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach.

However, as glorious as this weekend of birds and music on the coast was, as I write this I can’t help but think of Meinzen’s work Remnants, and share its sentiment of profound loss. Vast swaths of these precious, ever-dwindling grassland ecosystems are currently being destroyed by fire in Central and Eastern Oregon, undergoing an apocalyptic devastation that we have wrought upon these places, a devastation which gets worse and worse as the years go by.  I spent  quite a bit of time in these habitats earlier this year, in the sagebrush steppe of Harney County and the semi-desert canyon slope grasslands of Wheeler, and I wake up saddened each day as they continue to burn. I’d like to tell myself that, in the big picture there’s hope, that there’s time to turn things around as the “caretaker” species of this planet, but something tells me the jig is up. I sure hope I’m wrong.  I’ll do what I can, as so many others will, but I’ll also make time to lose myself in the joys of music, of birds, and of the tremendous, staggering beauty of the wild spaces that Oregon and the world have to offer. Maybe we’ll yet surprise ourselves.

Grasslands in the John Day River Valley,
N. Wheeler Co. OR. June 20, 2026
The entire area in this photo is ablaze as of 7/31/26.
 Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

Today's Birthdays

Benedetto Marcello (1686-1739)
Robert Planquette (1848-1903)
Ada Clement (1878-1952)
Norman Del Mar (1919-1994)
Walter Arlen (1920-1924)
Steuart Bedford (1939-2021)
Reinhard Goebel (1952)
Randall Davidson (1953)

and

Mary Harris Jones, or "Mother Jones" (1837-1930)
Primo Levi (1919-1987)
Kim Addonizio (1954)
J. K. Rowling (1965)

Today's Birthdays

Gerald Moore (1899-1987)
Meredith Davies (1922-2005)
Moshe Atzmon (1931)
Buddy Guy (1936)
Paul Anka (1941)
Teresa Cahill (1944)
Alexina Louie (1949)
Christopher Warren-Green (1955)

and

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
Henry Moore (1898-1986)
William Gass (1924-2017)

Talking with Jessica Lee in Oregon Arts Watch

My conversation with stellar violinist Jessica Lee about her work at Music@Menlo has been published in Oregon Arts Watch here.

Today's Birthdays

Sigmund Romberg (1887-1951)
Frank Loesser (1910-1969)
Charles Farncombe (1919-2006)
Avet Terterian (1929-1994)
Mikis Theodorakis (1925-2021)
Peter Schreier (1935-2019)
Bernd Weikl (1942)
Olga Borodina (1963)

and

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)
Don Marquis (1878-1937)
Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006)
Paul Taylor (1930-2018)
T.J. Stiles (1964)

Today's Birthdays

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678)
Rued Langgaard (1893-1952)
Rudy Vallée (1901-1986)
Kenneth Alwyn (1925-2020)
Riccardo Muti (1941)

and

Ludwig A Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Beatrix Potter (1866-1843)
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)
John Ashbery (1927-2017)

Today's Birthdays

Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829)
Enrique Granados (1867-1916)
Ernő Dohnanyi (1877-1960)
Harl McDonald (1899-1955)
Igor Markevitch (1912-1983)
Mario del Monaco (1915-1982)
Leonard Rose (1918-1984)
Carol Vaness (1952)

and

Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996)
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007)
Norman Lear (1922-2023)
Bharati Mukherjee (1940)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1966, Alfred Hitchcock's thriller "Torn Curtain" opens in New York — without the film score that Bernard Herrmann had composed for it. The famous director fired Herrmann during the score's first recording sessions when Hitchcock discovered Herrmann had composed a "symphonic" score and not the "pop" score that Hitchcock had specifically requested.

Today's Birthdays

John Field (1782-1837)
Franz Xaver Mozart (1791-1844)
Francesco Cilea (1866-1950)
Serge Koussevitsky (1874-1951)
Ernest Schelling (1876-1939)
Georges Favre (1905-1993)
Tadeusz Baird (1928-1981)
Alexis Weissenberg (1929-2012)
Anthony Gilbert (1934-2023)
Roger Smalley (1943-2015)
Mick Jagger (1943)
Kevin Volans (1949)
Angela Hewitt (1958)

and

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)
Jean Shepherd (1921-1999)
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

Today's Birthdays

Alfredo Casella (1883-1947)
Adolph "Bud" Herseth (1921-2013)
Maureen Forrester (1930-2010)

and

Eric Hoffer (1898-1983)
Elias Canetti (1905-1994)

and from The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1788 that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered into his catalog the completion of one of his most beloved works, Symphony Number 40 in G Minor (sometimes called “The Great G Minor Symphony”). It was written in the final years of Mozart’s life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.

Today's Birthdays

Adolphe Charles Adam (1803-1856)
Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)
Robert Farnon (1917-2005)
Ruggiero Ricci (1918-2012)
Guiseppe de Stefano (1921-2008)
Wilfred Josephs (1927-1997)
Peter Serkin (1947)
Philippe Hurel (1955)

and

Jonathan Newton (1725-1807)
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Frank Wedekind (1864-1918)
Robert Graves (1895-1985)
John D. McDonald (1916-1986)

Today's Birthdays

Franz Berwald (1796-1868)
Johann Vesque von Püttlingen (1803-1883)
Edouard Colonne (1838-1910)
Francesco Cilea (1866-1950)
Ben Weber (1916-1979)
Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)
Bernard Roberts (1933-2013)
Maria João Pires (1944)
Susan Graham (1960)

and

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Vikram Chandra (1961)

and from the former Writer's Almana:

It was on this day in 1829 that William Burt received a patent for the "typographer." It was a typewriter that looked more like a record player. It had a swinging arm that picked up ink and then printed a letter, and then the paper was manually adjusted to make space for the next letter.

Today's Birthdays

Luigi Arditti (1822-1903)
Hans Rosbaud (1895-1962)
Licia Albanese (1913-2014)
George Dreyfus (1928)
Ann Howard Jones (1936)
Alan Menken (1949)
Nigel Hess (1953)
Eve Beglarian (1958)

and

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)
Alexander Calder (1898-1976)
Tom Robbins (1936)
S. E. Hinton (1948)

Review of Music@Menlo concert in San Francisco Classical Voice

I attended Music@Menlo the past few days - as part of an MCANA Writers Institute. At the last moment, the editors of San Francisco Classical Voice asked me to write a review of the all-Mendelssohn concert that took place on Sunday evening. Here's my review of that event.

Review of Chamber Music Northwest concert - Banks, Ravel, and Tchaikovsky in OAW

Oregon Arts Watch has published my review of a Chamber Music Northwest concert that took place at Kaul Auditorium on July 13th. The co-commissioned piece by Banks added to the excitment of the event.

Today's Birthdays

Jean Rivier (1896-1987)
Isaac Stern (1920-2001)
Anton Kuerti (1938)
Cat Stevens (1948)
Margaret Ahrens (1950)

and

Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Tess Gallagher (1943)
Garry Trudeau (1948)

Today's Birthdays

Gaston Carraud (1864-1920)
Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921)
Gunnar de Frumerie (1908-1987)
Vilém Tauský (1910-2004)
Michael Gielen (1927-2019)
Nam June Paik (1932-2006)
Hukwe Zawose (1938-2003)
Carlos Santana (1947)
Bob Priest (1951)

and
Pavel Kohout
Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374)
Pavel Kohout (1928)
Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Fearlessness in the Face of Tyranny: George Takei and Kenji Bunch's Lost Freedom: A Memory Headlines Chamber Music Northwest's New@Night July 8

 

I love the Alberta Rose Theatre, especially now that they have new seats; sitting in the old ones felt like penance for some half-remembered sin. It’s got the darkened ambience of an old Portland dive bar but has too much class to qualify as such; you can get delicious vegetarian empanadas and a glass of Oregon pinot to take to your seat. There’s always a special feeling of excitement for me upon arrival; I know that I’m here to see something cool and new, and Wednesday July 8 was no exception. I was there for Chamber Music Northwest’s New@Night series, part of the 2026 Summer Festival featuring a headlining work by the legendary George Takei and Portland great Kenji Bunch: Lost Freedom: A Memory. It was structured around Takei’s memory of growing up for part of his youth in the euphemistically named Rowehr War Relocation Center in Arkansas, more commonly known as a concentration camp for Americans of Japanese descent during the Second World War.

New@Night is fascinating because all selections are curated by the performers. It opened with Bunch on viola and Alexander Hersh on cello, playing Paul Wiancko’s American Haiku. The composer wrote it in part as “an unpacking of my musical influences as well as an exploration of the connection between my compositional voice and my Japanese American heritage.” Hersh told the story of how, among other projects, Wiancko was composing string parts for punk bands in his USC dorm while composing this work.  It comprised three movements that flowed one into the other (Far Away, Transit, and Home).

Kenji Bunch and Alexander Hersh. Photo © Julia Varga.

It opened with big, sawing chords from Bunch and Hersh, all weeping glissandi and quivering harmonics. This was followed by simultaneous funky arco themes on the viola and pizzicato themes on the cello, and the slides were mewling and non-musical at times. The horsehair was flying from Hersh’s bow as they moved into folksy and accessible fiddling tunes, and Hersh played some very tricky motives that included open-string, left-hand pizzicato interwoven very tightly with rapid, bouncy bowing, and it ended with a quiet multi-stopped coda from both players.

Hersh is a natural storyteller with his words and cello, intense and engaging in both media.  He related delightful anecdotes about the composer of the next piece, Italian cello madman Giovanni Sollima, who has performed underwater and on a cello made of ice, according to Ethan Allred’s program notes. Hersh related that at the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival in Los Angeles, Sollima had a “bright red cello case, like a Ferrari,” and “he knew what it meant to be cool,” and all the younger players at the festival wanted to be just like him. Sollima’s work Lamentatio, Hersh explained, was like “Gregorian chant meets Metallica,” and pushes the boundaries of what a cello piece can be.

Alexander Hersh. Photo © Julia Varga.

It opened with Hersh singing, repeating variations of syllables “Oy-ya-you” and so forth, as the performer double-stopped and sang a rather mournful tune. Hard-hitting saltando was followed by rapid bowing and extended techniques like plucking the strings below the bridge while finger-tapping a melody as Hersh grunted and growled, and again finger-tapping while simultaneously bouncing the bow. The music was intense and mercurial, difficult and fascinating. That’s the beauty of a program like this; not only did it give me a chance to hear musical works that I’ve never heard before, but even more than that, a chance to hear music that is in itself unlike anything I have heard before. As I would imagine it is for the performer, this is mother’s milk for a listener who constantly seeks new sonic frontiers to explore.

Gloria Chien, Stephen Banks. Photo © Julia Varga.

A very different experience came next: composer and saxophonist Steven Banks was present to perform a set of his own compositions: Surrender and Through My Mother’s Eyes. He spoke about his first composition, and how the word ‘surrender’ kept coming to his mind over and over again. Gloria Chien accompanied him on piano, hammering away below a plaintive, wandering melody from Banks. He was able to bring strikingly different colors to the same register on his instrument, at first bright and piercing, then mellow, warm and reedy.

Erin Keefe. Photo © Julia Varga.

Next, violinist Erin Keefe played Through My Mother’s Eyes. Banks had explained how it was based upon a lullaby his mother used to sing to him, and was meant to portray, among other things, his own reluctance to settle down for bedtime as a youngster. It opened with harmonic squealing in a high register, like the high-pitched voice of a complaining child. For a brief moment Keefe played a rich, singing melody, like the voice of the mother, and then soothing chords finished out the piece.

* * *

George Takei has held a special place in my heart since I was a kid. I always loved his character on Star Trek, Lt. Hikaru Sulu. In addition to being the Starship Enterprise’s helmsman, he was a dashing swordsman and a stand-up guy, unflappable in the face of danger or conflict, and possessed of a wry sense of humor. Star Trek was hugely important in my chaotic and strange childhood; it provided a place of solace, of refuge from danger, and yet the Trek universe was familiar in that it, too, was strange and violent; no mere child’s play there.  When I was a bit older, as a young queer man trying to figure out how to accept myself and to find my place in the world, George (as we Trekkers call him fondly) took on a new meaning for me—he was a fellow traveler, a shining example, showing  me that queer men could achieve great things and be widely loved and renowned for their abilities, all while being their true, authentic selves. I had the chance to hear him with the Oregon Symphony a few years back, narrating Copland’s Lincoln Portrait in his rich, resonant baritone, and seeing his magnificent performance live was truly a childhood dream come true for me.

So, I jumped at the chance to write about the work he collaborated on with a composer whose music and philosophy I greatly admire, Portlander Kenji Bunch. For Bunch’s part, after the enthusiastic reception of his beautiful, phantomic, solo viola work Minidoka, which was inspired by a visit to the internment camp of that name, he was put in touch with Takei and they worked closely together, with Takei provided the narrative based on his youth in the internment camps during WWII, and Bunch composing incidental music to that narrative, which became Lost Freedom: A Memory.

It opened with Monica Ohuchi on piano, accompanying dissonant violin chords from Jennifer Frautschi and Claire Wells. The vibraphone sang sweetly under Sergio Carreño’s mallets as narrator Christópheren Nomura (Takei’s hand-picked recommendation for this performance) sat in quiet contemplation. Dulcet and sibilant, it was, strangely enough, a tune of joy and innocence. An audio file of Takei’s voice played, in which he spoke about the “suspicion, fear, outright hatred” to which he and his family were subjected. Though he was only five years old at the time, he had vivid memories of these experiences. He spoke about how Japanese Americans were spat upon, assaulted, had their homes and businesses vandalized.  He mentions the date February 19, 1942, the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the act that incarcerated virtually all Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. Though it wasn’t outright stated, it felt to me like this was mentioned because, in addition to the other more well-known date from Roosevelt’s famous presidential address regarding December 7, 1941, this February 19 was also a day which should forever live in infamy.

“I was five years old…this is what happened to my family,” Nomura began. Pizzicato cello from Jonah Ellsworth was accompanied by random-seeming percussion, and then a pounding on the bass drum, like soldiers hammering on a door. “We were terrified,” the narrator went on. It was explained how the whole family was forced to live in a horse stall at the Santa Anita racetrack, where you could still smell the manure.  In a strange turn that belied the seriousness of the work and hearkened back to the innocent feel at its opening, the narrator revealed that to “five-year-old me, it was exciting!”—but then he went on to relate his parents’ pain, anguish and devastation.

A piano ballad accompanied the narration about being transferred to the concentration camp in Arkansas, as young Takei wondered why all the grownups were crying. An elegy developed in the strings, including Bunch on the viola, and the piano ballad changed to a syncopated accompaniment. Young Takei went on to speak about the camp being “a magical place—a fantastical scene—trees growing on top of the water” as he described the swampy environs. The music morphed into a folksy hoe-down as the narrator talked about the magical transformation of the “tiny black fish” he caught with his bare hands, watching them sprout legs and turn into frogs in a glass jar.

Jennifer Frautischi, Monica Ohuchi, Claire Wells, Kenji Bunch, Jonah Ellsworth,
 Christòpheren Nomura, Sergio Carreño. Photo © Julia Varga.

Nomura went on, talking about the “loyalty questionnaire,” and one baffling question, seemingly designed to impress as many of the young men as possible into the armed forces of the country that had unlawfully imprisoned them. A solo cello sang as the idiocy of this question was brought to the fore: it simultaneously presumed that they all were loyal to the Japanese emperor and yet asked them to serve in the military. Takei stated it was an “ignorant, illiterate, idiotic question,” and those who refused to answer ‘Yes’ (because they had never been loyal to the emperor in the first place) were sent to a “segregation camp for disloyals.”  Takei and his family were sent to Tule Lake, one such camp, where there was “suspicion, radicalism, and outraged riots.”

 He went on to note that, despite the fact that their families were imprisoned unlawfully in inhumane conditions back home, the 442^nd Infantry Regiment, which fought in the European theatre and was composed almost entirely of second generation Japanese Americans (Nisei), became the most highly decorated military unit in U.S. history. (Note: this is easily verified, and among the honors awarded to the more than 18,000 men who served were 21 Medals of Honor (the nation's highest military award), 29 Distinguished Service Crosses, 371 Silver Stars, over 4,000 Bronze Stars, more than 4,000 Purple Hearts (earning the attached 100^th Infantry Battalion the nickname the "Purple Heart Battalion"), and many Legions’ d’Honneur, France’s highest honor, awarded to all surviving members in 2012.)

Nomura began reading off the names of each of the concentration camps as well as the numbers of people of Japanese ancestry who had been interned at each location, the vast majority of whom were American citizens. Over 120,000 all told, and it was read accompanied by alarming explosions from an ominous bass drum, later rolled with hard mallets like a funeral march in the background. When it was all over, these innocent, imprisoned citizens were given a one-way ticket to anywhere, and $25 each to rebuild their lives in a “hostile, racist America.”

It ended with a simple, sad sighing from the strings, the vibraphone whispering behind. Takei’s oft-repeated reference to this as “the darkest breakdown of our democracy” was accompanied by an elegant score, a noble closing statement from the piano to match his powerful words.

In this our United States of America’s 250^th anniversary, where government agents once again pound on people’s doors in the dark of night to disappear them into a system where they have no rights, it’s important that we do not forget our shortcomings as a nation, to pretend they do not exist while reveling in our triumphs. American works like this one from Takei and Bunch are a vital reminder that we must be vigilant, and stand fast against such atrocities; it’s this kind of fearlessness in the face of tyranny that makes America great.