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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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 442nd 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 100th 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 250th 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.
