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.

Today's Birthdays

Boyd Neel (1905-1981)
Louis Kentner (1905-1987)
Klaus Egge (1906-1979)
Peggy Stuart-Coolidge (1913-1981)
Robert Mann (1920-2018)
Gerd Albrecht (1935-2014)
Nicholas Danby (1935-1937)
Dominic Muldowney (1952)
David Robertson (1958)
Carlo Rizzi (1960)
Mark Wigglesworth (1964)
Evelyn Glennie (1965)
Russell Braun (1965)

and

Edgar Degas (1834-1917)
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747)
Pauline Viardot (1821-1910)
Julius Fučík (1872-1916)
Kurt Masur (1927-2015)
Screamin' Jay Hawkins (1929-2000)
R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021)
Ricky Skaggs (1954)
Tobias Picker (1954)
Jonathan Dove (1959)

and

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979)
Harry Levin (1912-1994)
Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005)
Elizabeth Gilbert (1969)

Today's Birthdays

Isaac Watts (1674-1748)
Sir Donald F. Tovey (1875-1940)
Eleanor Steber (1914-1990)
Vince Guaraldi (1928-1976)
Peter Schickele (1935-2024)
Michael Roll (1946)
Dawn Upshaw (1960)

and

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970)
Ernest Percival Rhys (1859–1946)
Erle Stanley Gardner (1899-1970)

Today's Birthdays

Antoine François Marmontel (1816-1898)
Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931)
Fritz Mahler (1901-1973)
Goffredo Petrassi (1904-2003)
Bella Davidovich (1928)
Bryden Thomson (1928-1991)
Pinchas Zukerman (1948)
Richard Margison (1954)
Joanna MacGregor (1959)
James MacMillan (1959)
Helmut Oehring (1961)

and

Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)
Roald Amundsen (1872-1928)
Ginger Rogers (1911-1995)
Tony Kushner (1956)

Today's Birthdays

Ronald Binge (1910-1979)
Jack Beeson (1921-2010)
Julian Bream (1933-2020)
Sir Harrison Birtwistle (1934-2022)
Geoffrey Burgon (1941-2010)
Linda Ronstadt (1946)
John Casken (1949)
Deborah Borda (1949)
Gérard Lesne (1956)

and

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669)
Thomas Bulfinch (1796-1867)
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
Arianna Huffington (1950)

Today's Brthdays

Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
Woody Guthrie (1912-1967)
Piero Bellugi (1924-2012)
Eric Stokes (1930-1999)
Unsuk Chin (1961)

and

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
Owen Wister (1860-1938)
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978)
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991)
Irving Stone (1903-1989)
Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991)
Arthur Laurents (1917-2011)

Today's Birthdays

Sir Reginald Goodall (1905-1990)
Carlo Bergonzi (1924-2014)
Jeanne Loriod (1928-2001)
Per Nørgård (1932-2025)
Albert Ayler (1936-1970)
Jennifer Smith (1945)

and

John Clare (1793-1864)
Isaak Babel (1894-1941)

Today's Birthdays

Anton Arensky (1861-1906)
George Butterworth (1885-1916)
Kirsten Flagstad (1895-1962)
Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960)
Van Cliburn (1934-2013)
Richard Stolzman (1942)
Roger Vignoles (1943)

and

Julius Caesar (100 BC - 44 BC)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
George Eastman (1854-1932)
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Today's Birthdays

Antônio Carlos Gomes (1836-1896)
Liza Lehmann (1862-1918)
Nicolai Gedda (1925-2017)
Herbert Blomstedt (1927)
Hermann Prey (1929-1998)
Francis Bayer (1938-2004)
Patrice Caratini (1946) Liona Boyd (1949)
Suzanne Vega (1960)
Aisslinn Nosky (1978)

and

James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)
E. B. White (1899-1985)
Harold Bloom (1930-2019)
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1798, in the nation's capital of Philadelphia, President John Adams signed an Act of Congress establishing the United States Marine Band. (The original "32 drummers and fifers" assisted in recruiting and entertained residents.)

Reviews of Oregon Bach Festival concerts published in Classical Voice North America

My reviews of two OBF concerts are now posted in Classical Voice North America here. I hope that you enjoy reading them.

Today's Birthdays

Henri Weiniawski (1835-1880)
Carl Orff (1895-1982)
Ljuba Welitsch (1913-1996)
Ian Wallace (1919-2009)
Josephine Veasey (1930-2022)
Jerry Herman (1931-2019)
Arlo Guthrie (1947)
Graham Johnson (1950)
Béla Fleck (1958)

and

John Calvin (1509-1564)
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Saul Bellow (1915-2005)
Alice Munro (1931-2024)

Pianist and Birder Kai Frueh talks in depth about his immersive Bird Concert coming up in Lincoln City on July 10

    I got a chance to do some birding and talk about music with Kai Frueh, who is presenting the final concert in his Bird Concert Tour this Friday night, July 10 at the Lincoln City Cultural Center at 7pm.  We met in Corvallis and drove to the nearby William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge, where we birded several spots, took some photos and recordings, and spoke in-depth about the program.  He also helped me get 5 Benton County lifers. (For those of you who aren't birders, a 'lifer' is a bird that one has never before seen or heard in one's life. So a 'county lifer' is a bird one has never before seen or heard in a particular county. Yes, it's a thing.)

Kai recording birds. Photo: Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Right, so yeah, cool. Looks like it's recording. It's Kai Frueh here  at... Where are we at now? [Editor’s Note: His name rhymes with “Fly Free.”  Also, All birds referenced in this interview are linked to at eBird, where you can view photos and listen to their vocalizations by clicking on the big green "Listen" button.]

KF:  [We're at] Prairie Overlook at William L Finley National Wildlife Refuge. Excellent. And we're looking for…whatever's here. Listening as much as anything, which is what a lot of birders love to do.

NWR: Yeah, that's what we do, right? So I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is…birds, birds and music. It sort of seems like a no-brainer for birding musicians, you've been very in tune with both birds and music since you were really young.

KF: I've been playing piano since I was seven. Um, I started after my brother-- my brother [Ben] started violin at four. He begged for like a year before he started playing, and then at some point I was like “Well, I guess I'll pick up piano.”  My brother is younger than me, so I ended up starting [my piano study] kind of close to the same time. I was homeschooled and always outside a lot, and then I had a good friend Isaac Denzer who started birding around eleven or so, I want to say. And then I picked it up at about age twelve.  That’s eleven years now. So it’s been a while.

NWR: Where are you studying now?

KF: I'm studying at Bowling Green State University. I'm doing my masters there; I did my undergrad at Lawrence University.

                NWR: So what's your master's degree in?

KF: It's piano performance; both my degrees are piano performance. Going very…kind of simple; it allows me to do more of what I want.

[Ed. Note Kai kept repeatedly hearing Western Kingbird, a bird I wanted for my Benton County life list; I listened for it as well. He looked around for me.]

KF: Oh, here you are. Nice. It's a good spot for them [Kingbirds]. Yeah. I think they breed out here. Why don't we walk out here just so we can get a little bit more? Get you a cool bird.

NWR: That'd be great. It’s always nice being out here, no matter what. Oh, I think I heard one now. Something out there. [Ed. Note: Break to look for birds.]

NWR: So, we were just talking about the sacrifices one makes for music, and what was that with the Great Gray Owl?

KF:  Oh, yeah. So, this was—I would have to go back and look when it was actually seen—but it was probably somewhere between seven and nine years ago. There was a Great Gray Owl in the county, not 20 minutes from my house. [Editor’s Note: Birders everywhere always go nuts for Great Grays, as we affectionately call them. They’re generally rare and hard to find and generally agreed to be one of the coolest and most majestic birds on the planet.]  But I had a rehearsal, and I think a small performance or something that day, and so I couldn't make it that day to look for the owl. I looked the next day, but I missed it. I also missed my lifer Sharp-tailed Sandpiper because I had an orchestra rehearsal. Still don't have that bird. My brother [Ed.Note: Violinist Ben Frueh] and a couple of our friends got to go see it, but I was at the rehearsal. I probably could have figured out a way to duck out early, but I just didn't. Those are probably the two biggest misses I've had because of music.

Western Kingbird. Photo by Lorin Wilkerson

NWR: Since you've been doing both birds and music since you were very young; was there some point where they always seemed to be connected somehow? Or was there a point where you started to draw that connection?

KF: I don't think they were obviously connected to me for a while. I was thinking about how birding helps, or how young birders tend to be musicians, but I didn't really connect it to my artistic practice until college. What partially got me thinking about it was during COVID, my brother and I did a series of outdoor concerts. We were playing outside at birders' places because that's who we knew. We played in Rich Hoyer’s backyard, and I remember some Lesser Goldfinches just went crazy during one of the pieces.

Then we were playing at Marilyn Miller's place in Bend, and a birder told me afterwards how helpful it was for her to focus out in nature instead of in a concert hall. In a hall, she had a hard time focusing, but out in nature, all these birds become part of the piece. That started me thinking about how I could play in a more natural soundscape. Obviously, a piano is not ideal for that, but then I went to Lawrence and heard the first pieces that were really inspired by birds: the Amy Beach Hermit Thrush pieces from 1921 [Ed Note: A video of Kai performing all compositions referenced in this interview can be accessed at the link above]. She heard them outside her window at the MacDowell Artist Residency and transcribed them. You'll get to hear those at the concert.

One of the faculty at Lawrence played those two pieces, and I knew I needed to play them. Then I met Brad Balliett, a New York-based composer and birder who is obsessed with Messiaen. We hit it off, and I premiered a piano piece Brad had written inspired by birds. That set me off. I decided I was going to do a bird concert eventually. Ideally, I would bring a piano out into nature, but the cost is unrealistic right now. For my senior experience, I thought about bringing the piano out into the bird song, but then I realized it was easier to bring the bird song to the stage using the big speakers at Lawrence. So, I continued to explore and commission bird-inspired music and work on the sound…

[E.N: As happens, we got distracted by birds]

KF: Oh, look, the Kingbird's coming in. Right there. I think a second one is coming in.

NWR: That's a great look. This is the first time I've seen them here in Benton County. We've got three Western Kingbirds now chattering and squeaking away.

KF: Maybe I'll grab my recording device. [E.N.: Here is a link to Kai's recording of one of the Western Kingbirds we heard that day.]

NWR: Sure. We'll get back to this.

[E.N., We started talking about Kai’s passion for recording birds, then remembered we needed to record that conversation.]

KF: Right, I've done a lot of that too. Let's see, where were we? Recording birds. So, I use a shotgun mic to record birds. I'm gonna hopefully invest in a parabolic at some point, but that's quite a bit of money, and I want to make sure I know what I'm getting into because they're less portable.

I use a lot of my recordings for live performances. You'll hear them in the concert on Friday. I use them in two ways. For some pieces, like the Amy Beach pieces—she didn't specify they be played with recordings, but she also didn't live at a time where that was possible. She probably would have thought it was awesome. So, I play those pieces with recordings of Hermit Thrush; I pair them that way.

I’m also doing a piece by Ravel. He doesn't specify which species, so I've taken some artistic license and paired it with some birds that I recorded in Europe last summer. Thomas Meinzen has been writing pieces for us, and he uses the recordings. I'm hoping to work on other collaborations for artistic endeavors. But I also do it partially as a "nerdy" thing; I keep a recording life list. It’s over 300 species now.

NWR: Oh, wow, that's great.

 KF: I've been keeping a photographic life list for years, and that one is well over 600. My life list is like 660 at the moment.  So, most of the birds I've seen, I've photographed. There are about 35 species I have on my life list that I haven’t managed to record.

NWR: Are all the recordings that you use in your concert recordings that you've made yourself?

KF: My goal is eventually "yes." There are a couple of recordings I've used, like the Hermit Thrush, where I didn't have my own. I’ve been trying to make some, but it's been super hard. Something about their song just doesn't pick up well on my mic. So, I've licensed some from some birders I know. And then for one of Thomas’s pieces, we're using some other recordings by some Oregon birders. But everything else is mine. My goal is to have all [of the recordings used for his performances] be mine eventually. I also make recordings for my list, and I am very interested in the quality of the recordings. I think a lot about that.

Black Phoebe. Photo by Kai Frueh 7/5/26.

NWR: So, when did you first have the idea to put together the type of program that you're performing now?  And to that point, what is the program like?

KF: While I was in college, I started thinking about creating a "bird concert." For my sophomore recital, I played two bird-themed pieces, but then I set it aside for a while to focus on other contemporary music. For my "senior experience" capstone, I finally decided to do the full bird concert.

NWR: So, this has been kind of developing in your head over the years.

KF: Yeah.  For that sophomore recital, I performed a piece Brad [Balliett] wrote for me; he's the New York composer, along with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve and Hermit Thrush at Morn.

Then for my senior recital, I decided I was going all bird; I was going to finally do my bird concert. I opened with the first movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, which is about a Nightingale and Eurasian Blackbird waking up. I also premiered Headland, which Thomas Meinzen wrote for Ben and me at the Sitka Sedge artist residency at Sitka Sedge, which is north of Lincoln City if you knowwhere that is. [NOTE: per Thomas, his residency was at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, not Sitka Sedge.]

NWR: I got my lifer NorthernParula there.

KF: Oh wow. So [Thomas] wrote Headland for us. Then I premiered a new piece by Brad Balliett that he wrote for me about birding at Nickerson Beach on Long Island in 2025.

I also played a piece called Twitcher by my friend Orson Abram. That piece uses a lot of my bird recordings and a transducer on the piano soundboard so the piano acts as a speaker for the birds. It uses a bunch of extended techniques. It's actually a text score, so it's very different than a lot of the other pieces.  

The first iteration also included an improvised piece Icreated called Woodland Soundscape using my field recordings, a commissioned piece by Julia Tchira, an Argentinian composer, about Upland Sandpipers. And then I played Balakirev’s arrangement of Glinka’s The Lark, that one’s kind of fun, and I ended with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve.

I pulled out all the stops for that concert because that year they had put surround sound into the concert hall. So, I programmed everything with surround sound; you’d be sitting in the hall and there'd be birds calling from different points for most of the recital. And I had video projection right behind me, and I had special lighting design. I wanted to go all out for my senior experience. And that was a lot of fun. That was kind of how I ended my time at Lawrence.

And then I began thinking I wanted to start bringing the program to birders, because I think birders would really enjoy it; It’s kind of like the target audience, though I think everyone can enjoy it. And so, I started reaching out to a bunch of Bird Alliances and got four concerts. I started out in Bowling Green, Ohio. Then I did the one in Portland with Bird Alliance of Oregon. I did one here in Corvallis with Mid-Willamette Bird Alliance, and then I'm going to Lincoln City, which is the one you're coming to, for Seven Capes Bird Alliance.

[Ed Note: I’ve condensed the conversation about program structure while keeping Kai’s anecdotes and analyses as follows:]

Opening: Amy Beach – Hermit Thrush at Morn (1921). I’m using the Beach pieces to bookend the recital.

Brad Balliett – Nickerson Beach which was written for me in 2025. Brad and I went out to Long Island for a music festival, and I said “"Hey, Brad, I want to go birding?” So, we met at like 5 a.m. at Jamaica Station and went out to Nickerson Beach.  Nickerson Beach is this beach where there's this giant Common Tern colony. There's lots of Black Skimmers, and I got my lifer Boat-tailed Grackle there, and they have Piping Plovers and American Oystercatchers that breed there. We had a Ruddy Turnstone, just a bunch of really fun birds like the Eastern Willet. This [performance] includes video Brad filmed through a scope on his iPhone. The birds in the video correspond to the birds Brad represents in the score. [E.N. For any of you who have ever tried to film or take photos through a scope on a smart phone and come away with abysmal results (like me, every time I’ve tried it), Kai assures me this is great footage. This gives me hope.]

Common Tern. Photo by Kai Frueh.

Thomas Meinzen – Remnants, a new piece premiered this past May.  This piece is about prairie and grassland ecosystems; something I'm really passionate about. I really like that ecosystem, and I feel like they're oftentimes overlooked from a conservation perspective. And that piece uses a system where I use Ableton [live sound processing system] to run all my sound, and I have one of the page turning pedals that controls it. And so at different points in the piece I will hit the pedal to trigger the sound.

I kind of wanted to share a little bit of the historic aspect of birds in music. And so I look at French composers because they used a lot of birds, so I'm doing [Jean-Phillippe] Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux, which um was written, uh—shoot, I don't remember the exact date. I think it's 1726. Um, so like three hundred—no, it's 1724. That's right, because it wasn't exactly three hundred years ago. [E.N. Kai’s mental process worked; he figured it out. 1724. It is most often translated as ‘The Call of the Birds,’ but alternate possible translations are ‘the conference’ or ‘the gathering’ of the birds.]

 The piece uses rocking intervals, of a fourth, and then then trills to kind of mimic birds twittering.  Composters frequently used trills, rocking intervals, repeated notes, and ornamentation to represent birds. So there's some aspects of that.  I perform that piece with recordings of Garden Warbler and Eurasian Blackcap, which are both common species throughout Europe. [E.N. Here is a link to Kai's recording of Eurasian Blackcap.] I kind of just had to take some artistic license because Rameau didn't specify which species. So I was like, okay, these are found throughout Europe, so he may have heard these. This will be fun.

Ravel – Oiseaux Tristes (1905).  It is part of his Miroirs Suite. It represents different bird species; he uses a lot of repeated notes and ornaments to represent the birds. I’ve been taking some artistic liberties and pairing it with recordings I made of Eurasian Wren, Eurasian Blackbird, and European Robin. “Oiseaux tristes” translates to "Sad Birds," and I think that those bird songs are a bit more melancholy, so it’s a good pairing.

Then, of course, I play the piece by Olivier Messiaen: The Lark, which is the sixth movement of his suite Petite Esquisse d'Oiseaux (1985). It’s short. I’m fascinated by Messiaen as a person. When I talk to musicians, they always react strongly to him. I wanted to represent that, but there is a lot of debate regarding the accuracy of his transcriptions [of bird vocalizations] and his whole process; I’ve done a lot of research into that.

He is an influential figure, but his transcriptions are complicated. Some are more accurate than others. Sometimes he tried to capture aspects of the birds other than just their songs, but he always spoke about how accurate they were, and he would then make quite inaccurate and confusing statements about birds, which is where the discourse becomes problematic. For example, in Des Canyons aux Étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), he has a movement about the White-browed Robin—an Australian bird—in a piece about America. He also made a comment about how the Western Tanager was only found in Bryce Canyon, I was like ‘Dude, they’re everywhere in the West.’

He was influenced by musique concrète and serialism, and he wrote all these…it’s a very different sound world. He would oftentimes expand intervals [found in birdsong] because they didn't fit the Western scale, so he would do all this interval expansion and extrapolation and he’s like ‘Oh, the proportions are the same, so therefore it’s accurate.” But he never documented how much he proportionately enlarged things. Musicologists have also noted that while rhythm was important to him, his written rhythms weren't always scientifically accurate to the birds. Still, he transcribed over, I think, 350 species of birds, which is quite an accomplishment, regardless of the accuracy.

It’s important to include him, but also to remember he wasn't the "first" bird composer. Amy Beach was transcribing live Hermit Thrushes in 1921. I even have a bird book from 1921 that uses Western musical notation for transcriptions. And Messiaen did go outside and spend a lot of time with ornithologists; he was very thoughtful in many ways, but then…yeah. It’s not a complete picture. Anyway, that’s a long sidetrack. I have a lot of opinions, a lot of thoughts about it.

NWR: [laughing] I can tell.

KF: Ok, and then going back to the program, I’m playing Upland Sandpiper--Batitú (2025), a piece by Julia Tchira, which was written for me last year. It’s about Upland Sandpipers, one of my favorite birds.  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.

My brother Ben will join me for Thomas Meinzen’s Headland. That piece was written for us at Sitka Sedge and is on our latest EP. We’ve adjusted some of the recordings from the last time we played it; we’re using all recordings made in Oregon by Oregon birders. It celebrates the Oregon Coast and opens with Marbled Murrelet calls.

We end the program in a similar spot to where we started, with Amy Beach’s Hermit Thrush at Eve (1921). It bookends the performance nicely. This is a "living concert;” the repertoire might shift next time I play it. Next time I’m going to probably commission a new piece for the program. I’m planning on doing something interactive, but…yeah. Let’s see.

So that’s the program.

Barn Swallow. Photo by Kai Frueh.