Today's Birthdays

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Modeste Moussorgsky (1839-1881)
Eddie James "Son" House (1902-1988)
Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949)
Paul Tortelier (1914-1990)
Nigel Rogers (1935)
Owain Arwel Hughes (1942)
Elena Firsova (1950)
Ann MacKay (1956)

and

Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978)
Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998)
Ved Mehta (1934)

From the New Music Box:

On March 21, 1771, the Massachusetts Gazette published an announcement for a musical program including "select pieces on the forte piano and guitar." It is the earliest known reference to the piano in America.

Today's Birthdays

Beniamino Gigli (1890-1957)
Lauritz Melchoir (1890-1973)
Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997)
Dame Vera Lynn (1917)
Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970)
Marian McPartland (1918-2013)
Henry Mollicone (1946)

and

Ovid (43 BC - AD 17)
Ned Buntline (1823-1886)
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1928, the New York Symphony and the New York Philharmonic Society united to form the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York - now known as simply "The New York Philharmonic."

Today's Birthdays

Max Reger (1873-1916)
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-1994)
Nancy Evans (1915-2000)
Dinu Lipatti (1917-1950)
Robert Muczynski (1929-2010)
Ornette Coleman (1930-2015)
Myung-Wha Chung (1944)
Carolyn Watkinson (1949)
Mathew Rosenblum (1954)

and

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
Nikolay Gogol (1809-1852)
Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)
Philip Roth (1933)

Collective artistry drums up terrific world premiere with Oregon Symphony

Four virtuoso percussionists collaborated with the Oregon Symphony to create a phenomenally exciting world premiere performance of Drum Circles by American composer Christopher Theofanidis on Monday evening (March 11) at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The foursome (Ji Hye Jung, Matthew Keown, Svet Stoyanov, and Sam Um), who are members of The Percussion Collective Robert Van Sice, astonishingly memorized an amount of complicated music, involving a large array of percussion instruments arranged in front of the orchestra across the width of the stage and to either side of Music Director Carlos Kalmar. Their dramatic and compelling performance was a truly memorable experience.

Robert van Sice is a world-renown percussionist and marimba player who teaches at the Curtis Institute. He recently founded The Percussion Collective Robert Van Sice, which consists of top-tier percussionists, and they were perfect for Drum Circles. The piece, co-commissioned by the Oregon Symphony, the Aspen Music Festival, the Baltimore Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony, consists of five movements with evocative titles, such as “Sparks and chants” and “Three chords and truth.”

According to Robert McBride, who interviewed Theofanidis before the performance, Jung, Keown, Stoyanov, and Um worked with the composer, using email, phone calls, and a quartet video rehearsal while the piece was being written, but the five of them never worked on it in-person until they arrived in Portland. Wow!

The first movement, “Rivers and anthems,” opened strongly with a wild series of tones on the marimbas that were supported by a driving beat from the bass drum (Niel Deponte) and timpani (Jonathan Greeney) and drum set (Michael Roberts). The dazzling array of tones and overtones transitioned to a celestial sonic cloud from the vibraphones and cymbals. Melodic lines seemed to overlay each other as if in a dream.

The second movement, “Sparks and chants,” began with single pulses from the soloists, which suggested a bit of tension just before catching fire and taking off. The strings picked up the thread, which, at one point, seemed to throw out a question (if music can do that). Later a broad trumpet fanfare faded away, and we were left again with single percussive notes.

The third movement (“How can you smile when you’re deep in thought?”), offered a series of humorous strokes from a typewriter before the music accelerated into a veritable blitz of sounds and deft interplay between the soloists.

The fourth movement, “Spirits and drums,” provided an echo-like exchange between the orchestra’s percussionists and the soloists. The back and forth exchange suggested a warpath accompanied by deep, serious chords from cellos and bass violins.

The final movement, “Three chords and truth,” returned to a more melodic direction that reminded me of a Renaissance style with shimmering cymbals. Somewhere along the way, all four soloists had to play exactly the same notes at the same time in a way that was sort of random. They did so by watching each other extremely carefully… and it was like a mind-meld.

After the piece ended, the audience erupted with cheers and enthusiastic applause. Jung, Keown, Stoyanov, and Um returned several times and responded with a lovely encore based on a tango by Astor Piazzola.

The other pieces on the concert were also played exceptionally well. After intermission, Sarah Kwak gave an exquisite interpretation of Vaughn Williams’s The Lark Ascending. The lyrical music evoked images of an idyllic setting where the bird would sing before taking flight. The strings fashioned gentle waves and the woodwinds and French horns complimented the bucolic atmosphere perfectly.

To open the concert, the orchestra delivered a crisp and vigorous interpretation of the Overture to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Yet, because the musicians were located further back on the stage (behind the massive number of percussion instruments), some of the sound was less present.

The concert concluded with Mendelssohn’s Fourth Symphony (Italian). The joyous opening was light but not fluffy, highlighted by the tremendous woodwind section. One of the bass violinists must have broken a string, because he quietly exited with his instrument right after the first movement. The bass violins played added just a bit more volume and the rest of the piece went along as if nothing was amiss at all. The dynamics and pace were fresh and inspiring until the final notes. It was a marvelous performance of a great masterpiece.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Christoph Vogel (1756-1788)
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908)
Paul Le Flem (1881-1984)
Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973)
Willem van Hoogstraten (1884-1964)
Nobuko Imai (1943)
James Conlon (1950)
Jan-Hendrik Rootering (1950)
Courtney Pine (1964)

and

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Manly Hall (1901-1990)
George Plimpton (1927-2003)
Christa Wolf (1929-2011)
John Updike (1932-2009)

Today's Birthdays

Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (1665-1729)
Manuel García II (1805-1906)
Joseph Rheinberger (1839-1901)
Giuseppe Borgatti (1871-1950)
Brian Boydell (1917-2000)
Nat "King" Cole (1917-1965)
John LaMontaine (1920-2013)
Stephen Dodgson (1924-2013)
Betty Allen (1927-2009)
John Lill (1944)
Michael Finnissy (1946)
Patrick Burgan (1960)

and

Edmund Kean (1787-1833)
Frank B. Gilbreth (1911-2001)
Penelope Lively (1933)

Today's Birthdays

Enrico Tamberlik (1820-1889)
Henny Youngman (1906-1998)
Christa Ludwig (1928)
Sir Roger Norrington (1934)
Teresa Berganza (1935)
David Del Tredici (1937)
Claus Peter Flor (1953)

and

James Madison (1751-1836)
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)
César Vallejo (1892-1938)
Sid Fleischman (1920-2010)
Alice Hoffman (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767)
Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756)
Pierre-Louis Couperin (1755-1789)
Johann Strauss Sr. (1804-1849)
Lawrance Collingwood (1887-1982)
Witold Rudziński (1913-2004)
Quincy Jones (1933)
Phillip Joll (1954)

and

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Sylvia Beach (1887-1962)
Max Shulman (1919-1988)
Diane Arbus (1923-1871)

Today's Birthdays

Michael Blavet (1700-1768)
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
Alec Rowley (1892-1958)
Irène Joachim (1913-2001)
Jane Rhodes (1929-2011)
Alberto Ponce (1935)
Lionel Friend (1945)
Julia Migenes (1949)
Wolfgang Rihm (1952)
Anthony Powers (1953)
Moses Hogan (1957-2003)
Terence Blanchard (1962)

and

Janet Flanner (1892-1978)
George Seferis (1900-1971)

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Arne (1710-1778)
Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911)
Hans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965)
Ralph Shapey (1921-2002)
Norbert Brainin (1923-2005)
Philip Jones (1928-2000)
Helga Pilarczyk (1935-2011)
Liza Minnelli (1946)
James Taylor (1948)

and

George Berkeley (1685-1753)
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916)
Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Edward Albee (1928-2016)
Virginia Hamilton (1934-2002)
Naomi Shihab Nye (1952)
Carl Hiaasen (1953)
David Eggers (1970)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Ruggles (1876-1971)
Henry Cowell (1897-1965)
Xavier Montsalvage (1912-2002)
Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992)
Sarah Walker (1943)
Tristan Murail (1947)
Bobby McFerrin (1950)
Katia Labèque (1950)

and

Torquato Tasso (1544-1495)
Ezra Jack Keats (1916-1983)
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1829, Mendelssohn conducts a revival performance of J.S. Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" in Berlin.

Today's Birthdays

Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838)
Dudley Buck (1839-1909)
Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908)
Arthur Honnegger (1892-1955)
Dame Eva Turner (1892-1990)
Bix Biederbecke (1903-1931)
Sir Charles Groves (1915-1992)
William Blezard (1921-2003)
Andrew Parrott (1947)
Stephen Oliver (1950-1992)

and

Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933)
Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948)
Heywood Hale Broun (1918-2001)
David Rabe (1940)

Today's Birthdays

Josef Mysliveczek (1737-1781)
Archie Camden (1888-1979)
Dame Isobel Baillie (1895-1983)
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
Ornette Coleman (1930-2015)
David Matthews (1943)
Kalevi Aho (1949)
Howard Shelley (1950)

and

Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512)
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)
Mickey Spillane (1918-2006)
David Pogue (1963)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1831, Italian violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini makes his Parisian debut a the Opéra. Composers in the audience include Meyerbeer, Cherubini, Halvéy. and Franz Liszt (who transcribes Pagnini's showpiece "La Campanella" for piano). Also in attendance are the many famous novelists and poets, including George Sand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Mussset and Heinrich Heine.

Todayk's Birthdays

Eduard Strauss (1835-1916)
Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935)
Colin McPhee (1900-1964)
Lightnin' Hopkins (1912-1982)
Ben Johnston (1926)
Nicolas Flagello (1928-1994)
Jean Rudolphe Kars (1947)
Isabel Buchanan (1954)

and

Richard Ellmann (1918-1987)
Ben Okri (1959)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1985, Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, age 22, makes his operatic debut at the Teatro Nuovo in Naples, singing the lead tenor role in Domenico Morelli's comic opera "L'Amico Francesco."

Today's Birthdays

Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613)
Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000)
Dick Hyman (1927)
Christian Wolff (1934)
Robert Tear (1939-2011)
Barthold Kuijken (1949)
Simon Halsey (1958)

and

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932)
Leslie Fiedler (1917-2003)
Neil Postman (1931-2003)
John McPhee (1933)
Leslie A. Fiedler (1948)
Jeffrey Eugenides (1960)

Today's Birthdays

John Wilbye (1574-1638)
Tomaso Antonio Vitali (1663-1745)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Heino Eller (1887-1970)
Christopher Seaman (1942)
Uri Segal (1944)
Townes Van Zandt (1944-1997)
Nicholas Kraemer (1945)
Clive Gillinson (1946)
Okko Kamu (1946)
Montserrat Figueras (1948-2011)
Michael Chance (1955)

and

William York Tindall (1903-1981)
William Boyd (1952)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1897, Johannes Brahms attends his last concerts and hears his Symphony No. 4 conducted by Hans Richter.

Today's Birthdays

Oscar Straus (1870-1954)
Julius Rudel (1921-2014)
Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006)
Wes Montgomery (1925-1968)
Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015)
Lorin Maazel (1930-2014)
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (1944)
Stephen Schwartz (1948)
Marielle Labèque (1952)
Mark Gresham (1956)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin (1975)

and

Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Ring Lardner (1885-1933)
Gabriel García Márquez (1928-2014)
Willie Mays (1931)
Dick Fosbury (1947)

Today's Birthdays

Alphonse Hasselmans (1845-1912)
Arthur Foote (1853-1937)
Pauline Donalda (1882-1970)
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Anthony Hedges (1931)
Barry Tuckwell (1931)
Sheila Nelson (1936)
Richard Hickox (1948)

and

Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594)
Frank Norris (1870-1902)
Leslie Marmon Silko (1948)

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1750 that the first Shakespearean play was presented in America. Richard III was performed by the actors of Walter Murray and William Kean’s troupe from Philadelphia. Theater was still new in the colonies. And though it was popular in Philadelphia, that city still preferred to pride itself on its scientific and literary achievements, so Murray and Kean set out for New York City.

Through the 1700s, New York’s primary form of entertainment was drinking. By the time Murray and Kean arrived in February of 1750, there were 10,000 city residents and over 150 taverns. Murray and Kean set up shop in a two-story wooden structure on Nassau Street, slightly east of Broadway.

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Carlos Surinach (1915-1997)
Cecil Aronowitz (1916-1978)
Samuel Adler (1928)
Bernard Haitink (1929)
Aribert Reimann (1936)
Ralph Kirshbaum (1946)
Leanna Primiani (1968)

and

Khaled Hosseini (1965)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1801,the U.S. Marine Band performed for Thomas Jefferson's inaugural. Jefferson, an avid music lover and amateur violinist, gave the Marine Band the title "The President's Own." Since that time, the band has played for every presidential inaugural.

Dr. Atomic and the Rach 2 form an impressive outing by the Oregon Symphony

Marc-Andre Hamelin

Saturday February 23 saw the OSO present an intense and weighty concert featuring the Dr. Atomic Symphony, distilled from the opera of the same name by composer John Adams, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor by Rachmaninoff, and Richard Strauss's Death and Transfiguration.*

The evening opened with symphony based on Adams's opera, which deals with the emotions of Robert J. Oppenheimer in the days preceding the first test of an atomic weapon on human history, deep in the New Mexico desert. In Adams's own words the work "is kind of explosive, as if it were Oppenheimer's plutonium sphere just about to go supercritical." The disturbing cacophony from the first notes onward set the tone for this deeply serious work.  The tremendous percussion section of the OSO had their work cut out for them in this piece, with tuned gongs, thunder sheet, tam tams and crotales among the instruments featured prominently, not to mention the incredibly demanding part written for the timpani, and the section executed everything masterfully. The double basses grumbled like a disgruntled animal, and contributed to an unsettling feeling of being on the ragged edge of something terrifying, unavoidable and yet somehow profoundly alluring.  The OSO explored the fascinating, syncopated sound world fearlessly, and the haunting trumpet in the final act gave voice to the tortured mind of Oppenheimer contemplating the awesome power of the destructive device he has wrought.

Marc-Andre Hamelin was the soloist for the Rachmaninoff piano concerto. The chordal passages at the opening were bold and beautiful, but his arpeggios, while precise, felt a bit understated. Dream-like scalar passages were unfortunately marred by the orchestra being slightly out of sync with the soloist, by a narrow but consistently noticeable margin, especially in the cadences. At other times the voice of the piano was simply subsumed by the orchestra.

In the Adagio, the duets between piano and various woodwinds were delightful, like a breathless lullaby. The long, slow solo part was followed by strings playing molto cantabile for all they were worth, swooning and soaring.  Hamelin was brilliant, hanging on every isolated note and phrase, infusing them with deep meaning.  He attacked the final movement with a jocular staccatissimo, playing with a tinkling, vibraphone-like quality. For all his deft and delicate touch he still brought the thunder for the showy Rach fireworks display, and the orchestra did a much better job of getting out of the soloists way in the finale.

*Due to illness I was unable to stay and review the Strauss, which comprised the second half of the evening.

Today's Birthdays

Eugen d'Albert (1864-1932)
Henry Wood (1869-1944)
Federico Moreno Torroba (1891-1982)
Margaret Bonds (1913-1972)
Frank Wigglesworth (1918-1996)
Doc Watson (1923-2012)
Martin Lovett (1927)
Florence Quivar (1944)
Roberta Alexander (1949)
Katia Labèque (1950)

and

James Merrill (1926-1995)
Ira Glass (1959)

From the Writer's Almanac:

Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata was published on this date in 1802. Its real name is the slightly less evocative “Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, Opus 27, No. 2,” and its Italian subtitle is translated as “almost a fantasy.” In 1832, five years after Beethoven’s death, a German critic compared the sonata to the effect of moonlight shining on Lake Lucerne, and the interpretation became so popular that, by the end of the century, the piece was universally known as the “Moonlight Sonata.” Beethoven himself had attributed the emotion of the piece to sitting at the bedside of a friend who had suffered an untimely death.

It was on this day in 1875 that the opera Carmen appeared on stage for the first time at the Opéra-Comique in France. When it premiered, the audience was shocked by the characters of Carmen, a gypsy girl, and her lover, Don José. The opera ran for 37 performances even though it came out late in the season, and it came back the next season, too.

Nietzsche heard Carmen 20 different times, and thought of it as a musical masterpiece. Tchaikovsky first heard Carmen in 1880. Bizet died of a heart attack just three months after the opera's debut.

It was on this day in 1931 that "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States.

The lyrics come from a poem written by Francis Scott Key more than a century before, "Defence of Fort McHenry." He'd spent a night toward the end of the War of 1812 hearing the British navy bombard Baltimore, Maryland. The bombardment lasted 25 hours — and in the dawn's early light, Francis Scott Key emerged to see the U.S. flag still waving over Fort McHenry. He jotted the poem "Defence of Fort McHenry" on the back of an envelope. Then he went to his hotel and made another copy, which was printed in the Baltimore American a week later.

The tune for the Star-Spangled Banner comes from an old British drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven," which was very popular at men's social clubs in London during the 1700s. Francis Scott Key himself did the pairing of the tune to his poem. It was a big hit.

For the next century, a few different anthems were used at official U.S. ceremonies, including "My Country Tis of Thee" and "Hail Columbia." The U.S. Navy adopted "The Star-Spangled Banner" for its officialdom in 1889, and the presidency did in 1916. But it wasn't until this day in 1931 — just 80 years ago — that Congress passed a resolution and Hoover signed into law the decree that "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the official national anthem of the United States of America.

Today's Birthdays

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)
Tom Burke (1890-1969)
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Marc Blitzstein (1905-1965)
John Gardner (1917-2011)
Robert Simpson (1921-1997)
Bernard Rands (1934)
Robert Lloyd (1940)
Lou Reed (1942)

and

Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) (1904-1991)
Mikhail S Gorbachev (1931)
Tom Wolfe (1931)
John Irving (1942)

and from the Composers Datebook:

Starting on this day in 1967 and continuing over the next two weeks, Russian cellist Mstsilav Rostropovich performed 26 works for cello and orchestra at 8 concerts with the London Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City -- including some world premieres!

Today's Birthdays

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960)
Glenn Miller (1904-1944)
Leo Brouwer (1939)
Moray Welsh (1947)
Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson (1954-2006)
Galina Gorchakova (1962)
Thomas Adès (1971)

and

Oskar Kokoschka (1866-1980)
Ralph Ellison (1913-1994)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)

Today's Birthdays

John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951)
Sergueï Bortkiewicz (1877-1952)
Guiomar Novaes (1895-1979)
Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967)
Roman Maciejewski (1910-1998)
George Malcolm (1917-1997)
Joseph Rouleau (1929)
Osmo Vänskä (1953)
Markus Stenz (1965)

and

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Linus Pauling (1901-1994)
Stephen Spender (1909-1995)
Zero Mostel (1915-1977)
Frank Gehry (1929)
John Fahey (1939-2001)
Stephen Chatman (1950)
Colum McCann (1965)
Daniel Handler (1970)

and from the Composers Datebook

On this date in 1882, the Royal College of Music is founded in London.

Today's Birthdays

Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918)
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976)
Marian Anderson (1897-1993)
Elizabeth Welch (1904-2003)
Viktor Kalabis (1923-2006)
Mirella Freni (1935)
Morten Lauridsen (1943)
Gidon Kremer (1947)
Frank-Peter Zimmermann (1956)

and

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
Ralph Nadar (1934)
N. Scott Momaday (1934)

Blind pianist wows crowd at Vancouver Symphony concert

Ignasi Cambra amazed Vancouver Symphony patrons with an exceptional performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto on Saturday afternoon (February 22) to a near-capacity audience at Skyview Concert Hall. The Spanish pianist played the piece with impeccable technique and delivered the emotional goods with panache, a truly commendable achievement for any talented pianist. Yet one additional element made this performance exceptionally memorable… Cambra is blind.

Cambra’s condition made it all the more mesmerizing to watch his fingers dash up and down the keyboard as his every move was projected on two large screens positioned on either side of the stage. Besides commanding hand-crossovers with panache and delivering numerous immaculate trills, he also played the entire piece with great sensitively, always making sure that the melodic line could be heard even when the orchestra was playing its loudest.

Cambra gave the first movement (Allegro con brio) a joyful and lively quality that elicited an extended round of applause from the audience. The second (Largo) was dreamy and accompanied by a wonderfully silky sound from the violins. The third (Rondo: Allegro) galloped off at a good clip, and Cambra added a crisp snap to some of the phrases.

After the concerto concluded, the listeners erupted with their appreciation, and Brotons brought Cambra back to the keyboard where he played two encores. The first was a Scarlatti sonata in D minor, in which Cambra deftly displayed graceful ornamentation in the right hand. The second was the beloved and comforting “Träumerei” (Dreaming) from Schumann’s Kinderszenen.

After intermission, the orchestra gave a spirited performance of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony. Because this work is closer to the classical style of Beethoven’s predecessors, there are a lot of exposed sections for the strings, and those sections revealed that the violins were not always in agreement with intonation. The final movement sounded the best with Brotons and his forces finishing the piece dramatically. Another plus was the evocative playing of principal clarinetist Igor Shahkman.

To open the concert, the orchestra played the Overture to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The somber sentiment of the piece came across very well with the trombones sounding grand and noble. The nimble and lighter sections needed to be slightly faster and crisper to achieve more contrast between serious and humorous. But these quibbles aside, it was fun to hear the orchestra play the piece, and that made me wonder if the VSO might consider presenting a concert version of an opera sometime in the future.

Overall, the star of the concert was Cambra, and that, of course, brings up the possibility of another appearance by him with the orchestra in the years ahead.

Today's Birthdays

Anton (Antoine) Reicha (1770-1836)
Alfred Bachelet (1864-1944)
Emmy Destinn (1878-1930)
Frank Bridge (1879-1941)
Witold Rowicki (1914-1989)
Antoine Dominique "Fats" Domino (1928-2017)
Lazar Berman (1930-2005)
Johnny Cash (1932-2005)
David Thomas (1943)
Guy Klucevsek (1947)
Emma Kirkby (1949)
Richard Wargo (1957)
Carlos Kalmar (1958)

and

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
John George Nicolay (1832-1901)
Elisabeth George (1949)

Today's Birthdays

Armand-Louis Couperin (1727-1789)
Antoine Reicha (1770-1836)
Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
Dame Myra Hess (1890-1965)
Victor Silvester (1900-1978)
Davide Wilde (1935)
Jesús López-Cobos (1940)
George Harrison (1943-2001)
Lucy Shelton (1944)
Denis O'Neill (1948)
Melinda Wagner (1957)

and

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Karl Friedrich May (1842–1874)
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
John C. Farrar (1896-1974)

And from the New Music Box:

On February 25, 1924, the first issue of the League of Composers Review was published. Under the editorial leadership of Minna Lederman, this publication—which soon thereafter changed its name to Modern Music (in April 1925)—was the leading journalistic voice for contemporary music in America for over 20 years and featured frequent contributions from important composers of the day including Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Marc Blitzstein, Henry Cowell, Lehman Engel, and Marion Bauer. Its final issue appeared in the Fall of 1946.
And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1682,Italian composer Alessandro Stradella, age 37, is murdered in Genoa, apparently in retaliation for running off with a Venetian nobleman's mistress.

Today's Birthdays

Antoine Boësset (1587-1643)
Samuel Wesley (1766-1837)
Arrigo Boito (1842-1918)
Luigi Denza (1846-1922)
Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940)
Michel Legrand (1932)
Renato Scotto (1934)
Jiří Bělohlávek (1946)

and

Wilhelm (Carl) Grimm (1786-1859)
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
George Augustus Moore (1852-1933)
Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973)
Weldon Kees (1914-1955)
Jane Hirshfield (1953)
Judith Butler (1956)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1955, Carlisle Floyd's opera "Susannah" received its premiere at Florida State University in Tallahassee. According to Opera America, this is one of the most frequently-produced American operas during the past decade.

Concert preview with blind piano virtuoso in The Columbian newspaper

My concert preview of this weekend's Vancouver Symphony concert with blind pianist Ignasi Cambra appeared in Friday's issue of The Columbian Newspaper here. Cambra will play Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto with the orchestra.

Today's Birthdays

John Blow (1649-1708)
George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Sir Hugh Roberton (1874-1952)
Albert Sammons (1886-1957)
Dave Apollon (1897-1972)
Elinor Remick Warren (1905-1991)
Martindale Sidwell (1916-1998)
Hall Overton (1920-1972)
Régine Crespin (1927-2007)

and

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) - blogger of the 17th Century
W. E B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
William L. Shirer (1904-1993)
John Camp (1944)

Tidbit from the New York Times obit: In the early 1930s, William Shirer and his wife shared a house with the guitarist Andres Segovia.

From The Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1940 that Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land."

The melody is to an old Baptist hymn. Guthrie wrote the song in response to the grandiose “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin and sung by Kate Smith. Guthrie didn’t think that the anthem represented his own or many other Americans’ experience with America. So he wrote a folk song as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” a song that was often accompanied by an orchestra. At first, Guthrie titled his own song “God Blessed America” — past tense. Later, he changed the title to “This Land Is Your Land,” which is the first line of the song.

Today's Birthdays

Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817-1890)
York Bowen (1884-1961)
Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963)
Joseph Kerman (1924-2014)
George Zukerman (1927)
Steven Lubin (1942)
Lowell Liebermann (1961)
Rolando Villazón (1972)

and

George Washington (1732-1799)
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Gerald Stern (1925)
Ishmael Reed (1938)
Terry Eagleton (1943)

Music gives voice to silent films in VSO chamber event

During the silent film era (1895-1930), it was common for movie theaters to provide live music accompaniment while the film was shown. Most theaters hired an organist or a pianist, who could improvise as the movie played. Some theaters in larger towns or cities provided a chamber ensemble to accompany the film. Resurrecting this long-ago performance art, moviegoers got a refreshing taste of keyboard improvisation while watching Laurel and Hardy’s Wrong Again and incidental music from a chamber ensemble during Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman at Kiggins Theatre on February 10 as part of the Vancouver Symphony’s chamber music series.

The music for the performances was led by Rodney Sauer, a pianist, arranger of music, and scholar of silent films who lives in Denver. Sauer knows his way around the keyboard so well that he can play in the dark, because all of the lights were turned off when he accompanied Wrong Again. He improvised the entire way through 20-minute film in which Laurel and Hardy depict two clueless stable hands who mistakenly try to get $5,000 in reward money from a millionaire by bringing a racehorse named Blue Boy instead of a missing painting with the same name. Hilarious circumstances ensue after Laurel and Hardy bring the horse into the millionaire’s mansion and get him to stand on top of the grand piano!

The melodies that Sauer played had a music hall quality. Now and then, he would segue into something blatantly familiar like “Camptown Races.” He relied on a trill whenever Laurel or Hardy used an odd hand gesture to indicate that rich people were peculiar. If a scene was suspenseful, it was accompanied by an unresolved chord. Whenever the action became faster, the music picked up speed. Overall, Sauer’s deft accompaniment helped to give the film a voice and added to the laughter.

For The Cameraman, Sauer wrote a score that was a compilation of music available from the 1920s for silent films. He performed it with a quartet of VSO musicians: violinist Eva Richey, cellist Dieter Ratzlaf, trumpeter Bruce Dunn, and clarinetist Igor Shahkman. They opened the film with a quick fanfare and accompanied the scenes with gusto.

The movie’s plot centered on Keaton as a bumbling tintype photographer who falls in love with the receptionist at a news organization. In those days, cameramen were sort of like news hounds who had to go out and film some event that would capture the public’s interest. To impress and win the young lady, Keaton spends all of his money on an old camera and tries his luck at getting a story. After some mishaps he captures a big fight in Chinatown between rival gangs, but that reel goes missing due to a mischievous monkey. Keaton doesn’t give up and, with the aid of the monkey, captures an accident at a boat race in which he rescues the girl. In the end, his filming of the gang war, the boat race, and the rescue win him a job at the news company and the girl.

The movie had plenty of pratfalls and gags were expertly accompanied by the musicians. Salon-like music and lyrical passages accompanied the romantic scenes. The pace of the music quickened whenever Keaton raced through the streets or up and down flights of stairs. At one point, Keaton and another man are crowded in booth at a swimming pool and engage in a chaotic struggle to get out of their street clothes and into swim trunks. The chamber ensemble accompanied their antics with a Strauss Waltz. Much of the music was paired so seamlessly with the action or situation that I forgot about the music altogether. I have to admit that it would be fun to experience the movie and the music again to figure out how Sauer made the experience work so well. Overall, the experience of chamber music and silent film was magical.

Today's Birthdays

Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
Leo Delibes (1836-1891)
Charles Marie Widor (1844-1945)
Kenneth Alford (1881-1945)
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
Elena Duran (1949)
Simon Holt (1948)

and

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Erma Bombeck (1927-1996)
Ha Jin (1956)
Chuck Palahniuk (1962)
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Peter Salomon (1749-1815)
Charles‑Auguste de Bériot (1802-1870)
Mary Garden (1874-1967)
Robert McBride (1911-2007)
Ruth Gipps (1921-1999)
Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-1997)
Christoph Eschenbach (1940)
Barry Wordsworth (1948)
Cindy McTee (1953)
Riccardo Chailly (1953)
Chris Thile (1981)

and

Russel Crouse (1893-1966)
Louis Kahn (1901-1974)
Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
Robert Altman (1925-2006)
Richard Matheson (1926-2013)

Today's Birthdays

Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805)
Louis Aubert (1877-1968))
Arthur Shepherd (1880-1958)
Grace Williams (1906-1977)
Stan Kenton (1912-1979)
Timothy Moore (1922-2003)
George Guest (1924-2002)
György Kurtág (1926)
Michael Kennedy (1926-2014)
Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988)
Smokey Robinson (1940)
Penelope Walmsley-Clark (1949)
Darryl Kubian (1966)

and

André Breton (1896-1966)
Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Amy Tan (1952)
Siri Hustvedt (1955)
Jonathan Lethem (1964)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Battista Vitali (1632-1692)
Pietro Giovanni Guarneri (1655-1720)
Gustave Schirmer, Jr. (1864-1907)
Marchel Landowski (1915-1999)
Rolande Falcinelli (1920-2006)
Rita Gorr (1926-2012)
Yoko Ono (1933)
Marek Janowski (1939)
Marlos Nobre (1939)
Donald Crockett (1951)

and

Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916)
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
Len Deighton (1929)
Toni Morrison (1931)
George Pelecanos (1957)

Oregon Symphony with Simone Lamsma give intense and superb concert

Outside the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday (February 9), it was winter coat weather with temperatures below freezing, but inside things were toasty warm because of the fiery, incisive playing of violin soloist Simone Lamsma and the Oregon Symphony. It was the 34-year-old Dutch virtuoso’s fourth appearance with the orchestra, and this time around she delivered a searing performance of Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto.

Lamsma plumbed the extroverted and introverted contours of the piece with an intense fierceness. During the numerous lightning-fast passages, notes brilliantly took flight from her Strad, and she held nothing back form the rhapsodic, bravura sections. She also expressed the slower, melancholic sections with an equal amount of intensity, bringing out the somber colors that suggested a lament that my have drawn of the composer’s Armenian heritage.

The orchestra supported Lamsma expertly. Principal clarinetist matched her voice marvelously when he echoed a brief melodic line that led to her cadenza in the first movement. The same sensitivity was given by the bassoons and cellos and later. The folksy and dance-like rhythm of the last movement was playful between the orchestra and soloist, but it went by at a good clip, and Lamsma notched it up at one point into fifth or sixth gear before the piece ended.

The appreciative audience called Lamsma back to center stage three times, and she graciously responded with an encore. Instead of choosing a gentle and relaxing number, she tore into a wickedly difficult Finale from Hindemith’s sonata for solo violin. That brought down the house one more time.

The two outer pieces of the evening’s program provided a delightful contrast. The concert opened with Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, which the orchestra took at a blitzing pace. Urged on by Kalmar, the musicians showed off their agility straight away, pouncing on the first movement with alacrity. The serene second movement featured outstanding contributions by principal bassoonist Carin Miller Packwood. The third had a slightly strident opening, but finished quietly, and the fourth was super crisp, showing off the fleet fingerwork of the strings.

The concert closed out with a terrific performance of Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony. The sound of the orchestra was well-balanced throughout the piece. For example, the trombones’ entry near the beginning was soft yet just loud enough to be heard. The violins raced up and down with élan. The woodwinds created bird like sounds that put listeners in the midst of a forest. Concertmaster Sarah Kwak dished out a lyrically sweet melody during her solo. Clarinetists Shields and Marc Dubec offerred an amazingly blended sound. The French horns were polished an grand, and the final trumpet call by principal Jeffrey Work wonderfully announced the noble theme that makes this symphonic work one of the best ever.

The only oddity of the program was that Kalmar didn’t do any introductory remark. Over the years, Kalmar has gotten very adept at expressing some well-chosen ideas to the audience with just a few words about each piece on the program. I am thinking that this was just an aberration, and that we will hear him again in the near future.

Today's Birthdays

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)
Sr. Edward German (1862-1936)
Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947)
Andres Segovia (1893-1987)
Marian Anderson (1893-1993)
Paul Fetler (1920-2018)
Ron Goodwin (1925-2003)
Fredrich Cerha (1926)
Lee Hoiby (1926-2011)
Anner Bylsma (1944)
Karl Jenkins (1944)

and

Ronald Knox (1888-1957)
Jack Gilbert (1925-2012)
Chaim Potok (1929-2002)
Ruth Rendell (1930-2015)
Mo Yan (1955)

From the New Music Box:

On February 17, 1927, a sold-out audience attends the world premiere of The King's Henchman. an opera with music by composer, music critic and future radio commentator Deems Taylor and libretto by poet Edna St. Villay Millay, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The New York Times review by Olin Downes on the front page the next morning hailed it as the "best American opera." The opera closed with a profit of $45,000 and ran for three consecutive seasons. It has not been revived since and has yet to be recorded commercially.

Today's Birthdays

Charles Avison (1709-1770)
Willem Kes (1856-1934)
Selim Palmgren (1878-1951)
Maria Korchinska (1895-1979)
Alec Wilder (1907-1980)
Machito (1908-1984)
Sir Geraint Evans (1922-1992)
Eliahu Inbal (1936)
John Corigliano (1938)
Sigiswald Kuiljken (1944)

and

Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895)
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963)
Richard Ford (1944)

Today's Birthdays

Michael Praetorius (1571-1621)
Jean‑François Lesueur (1760-1837)
Friedrich Ernst Fesca (1789-1826)
Heinrich Engelhard Steinway (1797-1871)
Robert Fuchs (1847-1927)
Marcella Sembrich (1858-1935)
Walter Donaldson (1893-1947)
Georges Auric (1899-1983)
Harold Arlen (1905-1986)
Jean Langlais (1907-1991)
Norma Procter (1928-2017)
John Adams (1947)
Christopher Rouse (1949)
Kathryn Harries (1951)
Christian Lindberg (1958)

and

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
Art Spiegelman (1948)
Matt Groening (1954)

Today's Birthdays

Pietro Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676)
Alexander Dargomizhsky (1813-1869)
Ignaz Friedman (1882-1948)
Jack Benny (1894-1974)
Wyn Morris (1929-2010)
Steven Mackey (1956)
Renée Fleming (1959)

and

Frederick Douglass (1814-1895)
Carl Bernstein (1944)

and

On this day in 1895, Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London. He wrote the first draft in just 21 days, the fastest he’d ever written anything.

Today's Birthdays

Fernando Sor (1778-1839)
Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938)
Feodor Chaliapin (1873-1938)
Tennessee Ernie Ford (1919-1991)
Eileen Farrell (1920-2002)
Yfrah Neaman (1923-2003)
Colin Matthews (1946)
Peter Gabriel (1950)
Raymond Wojcik (1957-2014)
Philippe Jaroussky (1978)

and

William Roughead (1870–1952)
Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927)
Grant Wood (1891-1942)
Georges Simenon (1903-1989)
Elaine Pagels (1943)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1914, ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) is formally organized in New York City, with composer Victor Herbert as its first director.

Today's Birthdays

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812)
Roy Harris (1898-1979)
Franco Zeffirelli (1923)
Mel Powell (1923-1998)
Paata Burchuladze (1951)

and

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Max Beckmann (1884-1950)
Judy Bloom (1938)

And courtesy of the New Music Box:

On February 12, 1924 at New York's Aeolian Hall, self-named 'King of Jazz' Paul Whiteman presented An Experiment in Modern Music, a concert combining "high art" and "hot jazz." The concert featured newly commissioned works from Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Edward MacDowell, Irving Berlin, Ferde Grofé, and Rudolf Friml, but the highlight of the program was the world premiere performance of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Today's Birthdays

Rudolf Firkušný (1912-1994)
Sir Alexander Gibson (1926-1995)
Michel Sénéchal (1927)
Cristopher Dearnley (1930-2000)
Jerome Lowenthal (1932)
Gene Vincent (1935-1971)
Edith Mathis (1938)
Alberto Lysy (1935-2009)
Christine Cairns (1959)

and

Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
Philip Dunne (1908-1992)
Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993)
Pico Iyer (1957)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1841, was given the first documented American performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 at the New York's Broadway Tabernacle, by the German Society of New York, Uri Corelli Hill conducting.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Melchior Molter (1696-1765)
Adelina Patti (1843-1919)
Jean Coulthard (1908-2000)
Joyce Grenfell (1914-2001)
Cesare Siepi (1923-2010)
Leontyne Price (1927)
Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)
Roberta Flack (1937)
Barbara Kolb (1939)

and

Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Åsne Seierstad (1970)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1921, Charles Ives hears Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird" Ballet Suite at an all-Russian program by the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Also on the program were works of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff (with Rachmaninoff as piano soloist). Walter Damrosch conducted.

Oregon Symphony teams up with Manual Cinema for fantastic Hansel and Gretel

Wow! It’s amazing what artists can do with overhead projectors! Manual Cinema, a Chicago-based company that specializes in shadow puppetry, elevated the largely forgotten overhead projector into a splendid storytelling device, using impeccable timing and imagination to enhance the Oregon Symphony’s presentation of Hansel and Gretel on Saturday, February 2, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The imaginative visual component provided by Manual Cinema worked seamlessly with the orchestra, under Music Director Carlos Kalmar, and a stellar line-up of soloists to wonderfully convey Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera in a refreshing way.

Hansel and Gretel has been a staple of opera houses everywhere since its premiere in 1893, due to its beautiful music and charming story of two children, who get lost in the woods and almost gobbled up by a gingerbread witch. However, the storyline, based on one of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, has a serious undercurrent, because the children’s family is poor and on the brink of starvation. With nothing in the house to eat, the mother, in a pitch of anger over the children’s frivolous behavior, sends them into the forest to pick strawberries.

The Oregon Symphony’s production of Hansel and Gretel marked its North American premiere (the original version was presented at the La Monnaie De Munt, Brussels) as part of the orchestra’s SoundStories series. Several black-clad puppeteers stood next to four overhead projectors that were lined up in front of a screen behind the orchestra on the left side of the stage. The puppeteers deftly handled a complicated series of cutouts and also did live-action segments – all of which was projected onto a large screen centered on the back wall. All of the images, including the live-acting flowed seamlessly in sync with the music in a balletic way with no glitches of any sort.

A superb slate of singers portrayed all of the characters with panache. The voices of Chelsea Duval-Major as Hansel and Maeve Höglund as Gretel complimented each other perfectly, highlighting their collaboration with the “Angel’s Prayer” and the duet to celebrate the witch’s death. Jenny Schuler created the stern mother, who realizes the gravity of her mistake after the warm-hearted father, Gregory Dahl, arrives home with food that he had bundled together after dumpster diving. The sparkling, clear voice of Yungee Rhie wonderfully delivered the goods in the roles of the Sandman and the Dew Fairy. John Easterlin gave a tour-de-force performance as the Witch, punctuating his stentorian lines with an incredibly entertaining combination of cackles. The voices of the freed children were conveyed with distinction by the Pacific Youth Choir.

The orchestra performed outstandingly from beginning to end with terrific emotion that provided the connective tissue for the entire enterprise. Every section was on top of its game. It was fun to watch percussionist Niel DePonte play the cuckoo whistle for one of the forest scenes.

It was too bad that the supertitles had to be placed on either side of the orchestra rather than above the large screen, but that arrangement is the only one that works in the hall. The amplification of the singers muddied the diction a bit, but it was necessary due to limited rest for the singers between performances.

Bringing an opera into the concert hall with the visual aid of a group like Manual Cinema is much cheaper than doing a full-blown opera production. The success of Hansel and Gretel makes me want to hear more. Perhaps there is a way for The Oregon Symphony to commission another such endeavor. Just think of the possibilities! Well, you could reach for the sky with a complete Ring Cycle. Hmm…

Today's Birthdays

Ferdinando Carulli (1770-1841)
Franz Xaver Witt (1834-1888)
Alban Berg (1885-1935)
Harald Genzmer (1909-2007)
Hildegard Behrens (1937-2009)
Ryland Davies (1943)
Paul Hillier (1949)
Jay Reise (1950)
Marilyn Hill Smith (1952)
Amanda Roocroft (1966)

and

Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
James Stephens (1882-1950)
Brendan Behan (1923-1964)
J.M. (John Maxwell) Coetzee (1940)
Alice Walker (1944)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1893, Verdi's opera, "Falstaff," was first performed in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala. This was Verdi's last opera.

Today's Birthdays

Jacob Praetorius (1586-1651)
André Grétry (1741-1813)
Osian Ellis (1928)
John Williams (1932)
Elly Ameling (1933)
Gundula Janowitz (1937)
Margaret Brouwer (1940)
Stephen Roberts (1948)
Irvine Arditti (1953)

and

Jules Verne (1828-1905)
Kate Chopin (1850-1904)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Neal Cassady (1926-1968)
John Grisham (1955)

Today's Birthdays

Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927)
Ossip Gabrilovich (1878-1936)
Eubie Blake (1883-1983)
Claudia Muzio (1889-1936)
Quincy Porter (1897-1966)
Lord Harewood (1923-2011)
Maruis Constant (1925-2004)
Stuart Burrows (1933)
Wolfgang van Schweintz (1953)

and

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
Gay Talese (1932)

Today's Birthdays

Henry Litolff (1818-1891)
Karl Weigl (1881-1949)
Andre Marchal (1894-1980)
Claudio Arrau (1903-1991)
Stephen Albert (1941-1992)
Paul Esswood (1942)
Bob Marley (1945-1981)
Bruce J. Taub (1948)
Matthew Best (1957)
Sean Hickey (1970)

and

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Eric Partridge (1894-1979)
George Herman "Babe" Ruth (1895-1948)
Mary Douglas Leakey (1913-1996)
Deborah Digges (1950-2009)
Michael Pollan (1955)

Hagner and Stenz create a little magic with the Oregon Symphony

Sometimes it is interesting to see which guest artist makes the biggest impression at a concert. The Oregon Symphony offered an interesting choice at its concert on Saturday, January 26th, at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. On the one hand, virtuoso violinist Viviane Hagner made her debut with the orchestra in playing Unsuk Chin’s Violin Concerto. On the other, veteran conductor Markus Stenz made his debut on the podium, balancing the new work with two evergreens: Beethoven’s First Symphony, and Schumann’s Third.

Chin’s Violin Concerto, written in 2001, was divided into four movements denoted purely by beats per minute. But the tempo didn’t matter all that much, because the piece seemed to move all over the place, with Hagner spending most of her time in the upper register of her instrument. She created a huge array of sounds – from edgy, almost shrill to gnawing to glassy glissandos to quiet, simple notes – but no discernable melodic phrases – not even a snatch of one. The whole piece seemed to be more of an intellectual sonic exploration, and it was fascinating to hear the various episodes. The second movement had moments that sounded ethereal and sort of like a music box. The third featured an extended pizzicato section for the orchestra. At the beginning of the piece Hagner generated quiet tones that seemed to rise from out of a cloud of sound from the orchestra, and at the end of the piece, her sound became placid and was subsumed by general orchestral sound. Perhaps that phoenix-like emergence and extinguishment was meant as a metaphor for contemporary life.

To counter the edgy complexity of the Violin Concerto, Hagner played an encore from Bach’s solo sonatas and partitas for violin. Her performance sounded immaculate, eloquent, and full of inner light that just took one’s breath away.

As part of his introductory remarks to the audience, Stenz gave a short music class in regards to the opening of the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No 1 and how revolutionary it was. Stenz encouraged the audience to shout “Bam” and count the next sequence of beats – following his every gesture. Later, during the performance of the symphony, some of the audience members chuckled when they recognized the section of music that Stenz had taught.

The orchestra performed Beethoven’s First Symphony superbly. The fast passages were light and immaculate played. Each instrumental part seemed to be perfectly balanced. The dynamics offered wonderful contrasts and the tempos were spot on.

Schumann’s Third Symphony also received an outstanding outing. In the first movement, the French Horn section created a glowing sound, the trumpets were crisp, the violins energetic. And so the exceptional playing continued through the rest of the piece with a nod again to the terrifically balanced sound, sensitivity to dynamics, tempos, and just a sense of delivering the poetry of the music.

For each piece, Stenz eschewed the baton. His style at times suggested sculpting the air, and he was gifted at doing so with either hand. With the Beethoven and Schumann, he didn’t worry about keeping a clear beat; instead, he seemed to use his gesture to shape of music in a poetic way. Often the last note of a movement ended up with his right arm extended straight ahead and upwards.

The music lesson that Stenz gave at the beginning of the concert connected well with the crowd. A couple of my friends afterwards indicated that they liked his approach. It would be swell to hear him return to the podium and find out how he could reach out to the audience again. For that matter, it would be wonderful to bring back Hagner to hear her again as well.

Today's Birthdays

Ole Bull (1810-1880)
Christian Gottlob Neefe (1748-1798)
Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943)
Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969)
Jussi Björling (1911-1960)
Sir John Pritchard (1921-1989)
Luc Ferrari (1929-2005)
John Poole (1934)
Ivan Tcherepnin (1943-1998)
Josef Protschka (1944)
Phylis Bryn-Julson (1945)

and

Henry Louis "Hank" Aaron (1934)
John Guare (1938)
William S. Burroughs (1914-1997)
Christopher Guest (1948)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1887, Verd's: opera "Otello" premiered in Milan at the Teatro all Scala, with the composer conducting (and cellist Arturo Toscanini in the orchestra).

Today's Birthdays

Eustache du Caurroy (1549-1609)
Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795)
Aristide Cavaillé‑Coll (1811-1899)
Yrjo Kilpinen (1892-1952)
Bernard Rogers (1893-1968)
Erich Leinsdorf (1912-1993)
Jutta Hipp (1925-2003)
Martti Talvela (1935-1989)
François Dumeaux (1978)

and also

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)
Gavin Ewart (1916-1995)
Betty Friedan (1921-2006)
Robert Coover (1932)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594)
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)
Sidney Lanier (1842-1881)
Priaulx Rainier (1903-1986)
Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975)
Blas Galindo Dimas (1910-1993)
Jehan Alain (1911-1940)
Helga Dernesch (1939)

and

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
Georg Trakl (1887-1914)
Norman Rockwell (1894-1978)
Alvar Aalto (1898-1978)
James Michener (1907-1997)
Simone Weil (1909-1943)
Richard Yates (1926-1992)
Paul Auster (1947)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1844, Berlioz's "Roman Carnival" Overture, in Paris was premiered at the Salle Herz, with the composer conducting.

Vancouver Symphony struts down Broadway

The Vancouver Symphony put a little razzmatazz into its first concert of the New Year (January 26), pairing flashy and popular works by Copland and Gershwin with several numbers from the world of Broadway musicals. While the purely instrumental pieces were warmly appreciated by the near-capacity audience in SkyView Concert Hall, it was the collaboration with singer-actress Susannah Mars, the Portland Gay Men’s Chorus, and other guest artists that really got people’s attention.

Sashaying in from the left side of the stage, Mars did a bang-up job with “Hello Dolly” (from Hello Dolly) and “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” (from Anything Goes), backed up by 80-plus voices of the PGMC. They were brassy and had plenty of verve that got heads to nod along.

In “What I did for Love” (from A Chorus Line), Mars shared the spotlight with two students from the Vancouver School of Arts and Academics: Isabella Daltoso and Maddison Gebhard. Each took a verse, with Mars leading the way, and young singers showed that they could easily deliver the goods, making the piece very enjoyable.

Gebhard and Daltoso were joined by Julana Torres and Jae Specht for a lively rendition with dance moves of “America” (from West Side Story). They made terrific use of an extended stage area that didn’t leave much room for error.

The PGMC, expertly prepared by its Artistic Director Bob Mensel, were featured in three selections: “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” (from Oklahoma), “To Build a Home” (from The Bridges of Madison County), and “Wheels of a Dream” (from Ragtime). The men sang with enthusiasm and sensitivity, but , the tenor section needed to be stronger whenever they broke into harmony.

The musical half of the program concluded with “Make our Garden Grow” (from Candide) with Thomas Black and Mars as the soloists. Black’s warm and expansive baritone sounded well suited to the piece, but the timbre of Mars’ voice didn’t match up well. Music Director, Salvador Brotons and the orchestra didn’t hold anything back in the final measures, and the music expressed the hope of a brighter tomorrow, which was a great way to end the concert.

The orchestral suite of four dance episodes from Copland’s ballet Rodeo was played with a lot of spirit, but needed some tightening up, especially when a couple of violins jumped the gun at the in third episode, “Saturday Night Waltz,” causing first few measures to sound a bit out of whack. Still, there was plenty of good music made with excellent solos on trombone (Greg Scholl), trumpet (Bruce Dunn), and clarinet (Igor Shahkman).

Gershwin’s American in Paris fared much better, and the orchestra conveyed the scene of a young American strolling around Paris, sampling one diversion or another, yet becoming homesick. Solos on English Horn (Kris Klavik) and by the concertmaster Eva Richey were highlights of the piece and the bluesy sound of the trombone and trumpet suggested the comfort food of American music. The dynamics could have been crisper, but the orchestra wound it all up on an emphatic and joyful note.

The concert marked the first time that the orchestra had ventured into Broadway. The amplification of the voices (choir and soloists) was done very well. Some lyrics in the chorale pieces were difficult to understand, and that might have been circumvented if they had been printed with the program note. Still, the Broadway pops concept was a refreshing success for the orchestra.

Today's Birthdays

Louis Marchand (1669-1732)
Leo Fall (1873-1925)
Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962)
Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987)
Stan Getz (1927-1991)
Skip Battin (1934-2003)
Martina Arroyo (1937)
Sir Andrew Davis (1944)
Ursula Oppens (1944)
Eliane Aberdam (1964)

Also

James Joyce (1882-1941)
James Dickey (1923-1997)

Today's Birthdays

Francesco Stradivari (1671-1743)
Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768)
Johan Joachim Agrell (1701-1765)
Victor Herbert (1859-1924)
Julius Conus (1869-1942)
Clara Butt (1872-1936)
Sándor Veress (1907-1999)
Mozart Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993)
Renata Tebaldi (1922-2004)
Ursula Mamlok (1928-2016)
Michael G. Shapiro (1951)

and

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
S. J. Perelman (1904-1979)
Muriel Spark (1918- 2006)
Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

Today's Birthdays

François Devienne (1759-1803)
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Caroline Miolan‑Carvalho (1827-1895)
Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950)
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
Nathan Milstein (1904-1992)
Benjamin Frankel (1906-1973)
Alan Lomax (1915-2002)
Jaap Schröder (1925)
Odetta (1930-2008)
Philip Glass (1937)
Stephen Cleobury (1948)
Donna Summer (1948-2012)
George Benjamin (1960)
Jennifer Higdon (1962)

and

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Zane Grey (1872-1939)
John O'Hara (1905-1970)
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773)
Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935)
Walter Damrosch (1862-1950)
Mitch Leigh (1928-2014)
Lynn Harrell (1944)
Silvia Marcovici (1952)
Gerald Finley (1960)

and

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989)
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016)
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984)

Today's Birthdays

Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777)
Daniel-François-Esprit Auber (1782-1871)
Frederic Hymen Cowen (1852-1935)
Frederick Delius (1862-1934)
Havergal Brian (1876-1972)
Blanche Selva (1884-1942)
Luigi Nono (1924-1990)
Myer Fredman (1932-2014)
Malcolm Binns (1936)
Cho-Liang Lin (1960)

and

W. C. Fields (1880-1946)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1826 was the premiere of Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, "Death and the Maiden," as a unrehearsed reading at the Vienna home of Karl and Franz Hacker, two amateur musicians. Schubert, who usually played viola on such occasions, could not perform since he was busy copying out the parts and making last-minute corrections.

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Bartolomeo Bruni (1757-1821)
Ferdinand Herold (1791-1833)
Alexander Mackenzie (1822-1892)
Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982)
Vittorio Rieti (1898-1994)
Michael Head (1900-1976)
Ronnie Scott (1927-1996)
Acker Bilk (1929-2014)
Sir John Tavener (1944-2013)
Richard Danielpour (1956)

and

Colette (1873-1954)
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Claes Oldenburg (1929)
David Lodge (1935)

Today's Birthdays

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Juan Crisostomo Arriage (1806-1826)
Edouard Lalo (1823-1892)
Jerome Kern (1885-1945)
Jack Brymer (1915-2003)
Skitch Henderson (1918-2005)
Helmut Zacharias (1920-2002)
Fritz Spiegl (1926-2003)
John Ogdon (1937-1989)
Jean-Philippe Collard (1948)
Emanuel Pahud (1970)
James Ehnes (1976)

and

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
Dmitry Mandeleyev (1834-1907)
Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795)
Maria Augusta von Trapp (1905-1987)
Stéphane Grappelli (1908-1997)
Jimmy Van Heusen (1913-1990)
Warren Benson (1924-2005)
Jacqueline du Pré (1945-1987)
Frédéric Lodéon (1952)
Mikel Rouse (1957)
Gustavo Dudamel (1981)

and

Mary Mapes Dodge (1831-1905)
Seán MacBride (1904-1988)
Jules Feiffer (1929)
Christopher Hampton (1946)
Ellen DeGeneres (1958)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1790, Mozart's opera, "Così fan tutte," was premiered in Vienna at the Burgtheater.

Preview of weekend's pops concert in The Columbian

My preview of the Vancouver Symphony's pops concert with Susannah Mars and the Portland Gay Men's Chorus was print in today's Columbian newspaper. Here is a link to the article.

Today's Birthdays

Jan Blockx (1851-1912)
Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954)
Julia Smith (1905-1989)
Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)
Alfred Reed (1921-2005)
Etta James (1938-2012)
Russell Peck (1945-2009)

and

Robert Burns (1759-1796)
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Today's Birthdays

Farinelli (Carlo Maria Broschi) (1705-1782)
Frederick II the Great (1712-1786)
Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822)
Evelyn Barbirolli (1911-2008)
Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008)
Gottfried von Einem (1918-1996)
Leon Kirchner (1919-2009)
Neil Diamond (1941)
Yuri Bashmet (1953)
Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

and

William Congreve (1670-1729)
Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
Desmond Morris (1928)

Today's Birthdays

Muzio Clementi (1752-1832)
Rutland Boughton (1878-1960)
Django Reinhardt (1910-1953)
Milton Adolphus (1913-1988)
Eli Goren (1923-2000)
Cécile Ousset (1936)
Teresa Zylis-Gara (1936)
John Luther Adams (1953)
Mason Bates (1977)

and

Stendhal (1783-1842)
Edouard Manet (1832-1883)
Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 2894, Czech composer Antonin Dvorák presents a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Concert Hall in New York, using an all-black choir, comprised chiefly of members of the St. Philip's Colored Choir. On the program was the premiere performance of Dvorák's own arrangement of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks at Home," which featured vocal soloists Sissierette Jones and Harry T. Burleigh.

Today's Birthdays

Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727-1799)
Charles Tournemire (1870-1939)
Hans Erich Apostel (1901-1972)
Robin Milford (1903-1959)
Rosa Ponselle (1897-1981)
Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013)
William Warfield (1920-2002)
Leslie Bassett (1923-2016)
James Louis ("J.J.") Johnson (1924-2001)
Aurèle Nicolet (1926-2016)
Uto Ughi (1944)
Myung-whun Chung (1953)

and

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781)
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Howard Moss (1922-1987)
Joseph Wambaugh (1937)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day, in 1907, the Metropolitan Opera production of R. Strauss' opera "Salome," with soprano Olive Fremstad in the title role, creates a scandal. The opera is dropped after a single performance, and not staged at the Met again until the 1930s.

Today's Birthdays

Henri Duparc (1848-1933)
Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977)
Webster Booth (1902-1984)
Placido Domingo (1941)
Richie Havens (1941-2013)
Edwin Starr (1942-2003)
Suzanne Mentzer (1957)
Frank Ticheli (1958)

and

Louis Menand (1952)

Today's Birthdays

Johann Hermann Schein (1586-1630)
Ernest Chausson (1855-1899)
Julius Conus (1869-1942)
Józef Hofmann (1876-1957)
Huddie William Ledbetter (Lead Belly) (1889-1949)
Walter Piston (1894-1976)
Eva Jessye (1895-1992)
Yvonne Loriod (1924-2010)
David Tudor (1926-1996)
Antonio de Almeida (1928-1997)
Iván Fischer (1951)

and

George Burns (1896-1996)
Alexandra Danilova (1903-1997)
Federico Fellini (1920-1993)
Edward Hirsch (1950)
Tami Hoag (1959)

Today's Birthdays

Louis‑Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749)
George Frederick Bristow (1825-1898)
Fritz Reiner (1885-1963)
Paul Dessau (1894-1979)
Edith Piaf (1915-1963)
Dalton Baldwin (1931)
Phil Ochs (1940-1976)
William Christie (1944)
Marianne Faithfull (1946)
Olaf Bär (1957)
Steven Esserlis (1958)
Rebecca Saunders (1967)

and

Italo Svevo (1861-1928)
Constance Garnett (1861-1946)

Today's Birthdays

César Cui (1835-1918)
Emmanuel Chabrier (1841-1894)
John Laurence Seymour (1893-1986)
Berthold Goldschmidt (1903-1996)
Anthony Galla-Rini (1904-2006)
John O'Conor (1947)
Anthony Pople (1955-2003)
Christoph Prégardien (1956)

and

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869)
Rubén Darío (1867-1916)
A. A. Milne (1882-1956)
Oliver Hardy (1892-1957)

FYI: Roget's "Thesaurus" has never been out of print since it was first published in 1852.

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1958, "What Does Music Mean?", broadcast, the first of a series of televised New York Philharmonic "Young People's Concerts" on CBS-TV hosted by Leonard Bernstein. The series continued until 1972, with 53 different programs hosted by Bernstei

Today's Birthdays

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
John Stanley (1712-1786)
Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728-1788)
François‑Joseph Gossec (1734-1829)
Henk Badings (1907-1987)
Oscar Morawetz (1917-2007)
Annie Delorie (1925-2009)
Donald Erb (1927-2008)
Jean Barraqué (1928-1973)
Sydney Hodkinson (1934)
Dame Gillian Weir (1941)
Anne Queffélec (1948)
Augustin Dumay (1949)
Nancy Argenta (1957)
Gérard Pesson (1958)

and

Anne Brontë 1820-1849)
William Stafford (1914-1993)
Luis López Nieves (1950)
Sebastian Junger (1962)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1919, Polish composer and pianist Ignaz Jan Paderewski becomes premiere of Poland.

Today's Birthdays

Niccoló Piccinni (1728-1800)
Daisy Kennedy (1893-1981)
Ernesto Halffter (1905-1989)
Roger Wagner (1914-1992)
Ernesto Bonino (1922-2008)
Pilar Lorengar (1928-1996)
Marilyn Horne (1934)
Richard Wernick (1934)
Gavin Bryars (1943)
Brian Ferneyhough (1943)
Katia Ricciarelli (1946)

and

Robert Service (1874-1958)
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)
William Kennedy (1928)
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Mary Karr (1955)
Lin-Manuel Miranda (1980)

Today's Birthdays

Ivor Novello (1893-1951)
Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991)
Malcolm Frager (1935-1991)
Don "Captain Beefheart" Van Vliet (1941-2010)
Aaron Jay Kernis (1960)

and

Molière (1622-1673)
Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872)
Andreas William Heinesen (1900-1991)
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1941 Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time" was premiered at Stalag VIII-A, a German prisoner of war camp in Görlitz (Silesia), with the composer at the piano and fellow-prisoners Jean Le Boulaure (violin), Henri Akoka (clarinet) and Etienne Pasquier (cello).

Today's Birthdays

Ludwig von Köchel (1800-1877)
Jean de Reszke (1850-1925)
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Louis Quilico (1925-2000)
Zuzana Ruzickova (1927-2017)
Siegmund Nimsgern (1940)
Mariss Jansons (1943)
Kees Bakels (1945)
Nicholas McGegan (1950)
Ben Heppner (1956)
Andrew Manze (1965)

and

John Dos Passos (1896-1970
Emily Hahn (1905-1997)
Maureen Dowd (1952)

Funny stuff. Oregon Symphony delivers a quirky, rewarding Zimmerman, Shostakovich program.

Johannes Moser

The Oregon Symphony put together a program of divers emotional effect on Saturday January 12th. Pairing the brooding intensity of Shostakovich's first cello concerto with Bernd Alois Zimmerman's absurdist Music for the Suppers of King Ubu (with some Rossini and Rimsky-Korsakov thrown in to boot), the programming was ambitious and imaginative.

The eclectic opening work by Zimmermann, known for his quotations and pastiche,  consisted of eight short movements with a short standup routing by local comic Jason Traeger in between each one. Traeger's bits were (by and large) pretty funny; some were downright scarily insightful and hilarious, fitting for a work that is by Zimmerman's own words a cautionary tale about what can happen to a liberal elite when a dictator takes over.

Featuring quotations from Mussorgsky, Bach, Wagner, Richard Strauss and others, the farcical nature of the work established itself right off the bat. The work was littered with honking, squawking eructations from the brass, syncopated eruptions by the percussion--the entire piece was a giant finger in the eye to the elite and their pretensions. Delightful and joyous baroque dances and quotations by Bach ensued in the third movement. In the fourth, entitled Pile, Cotise and the Bear, the tuba and contrabasses seemed to dare the audience not to hear the great beast shambling onto the stage. The Phynancial Horse and the Lackeys of Phynance had all the stentorian stuffiness of a wealthy captain of industry putting on public airs with no pants on. Glorious dissonances from the ensemble, strangely delicate and clunky simultaneously, preceded and ominous, fast-paced executioner's march heading into a quote of Die Walkure and the finale. This was a weird and wonderful piece that was almost too much fun for everyone involved.

Following a delightful Tancredi overture by Rossini, Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major was the meat of the evening. Cellist Johannes Moser, beginning a 3-year artist-in-residence position with OSO, displayed an emotional dexterity immediately. Playing with an almost understated sonority--a pure, thorough and direct realization--he quickly metamorphosed into intense perturbation--a wailing, warbling tremolo that grabbed at the heart strings. Technically, the evenness of the difficult chordal passages and remarkable cantando he brought to bear were absolutely vital to understanding this piece which, like most Shostakovich, couldn't be described as upbeat or effortlessly accessible. His singing passages were subsumed by an incessant, suffocating motility from the orchestra; Moser bore up like a beset wanderer at the center of a tempest.

The Moderato was completely different--Moser played it like a lyrical threnody, but almost too weary to be terribly sad. In the high registes he played with the tenderest tremolando, so like a violin, and the trio between the soloist playing harmonics, clarinet and celesta was otherworldly. A prosaic intro in to the Cadenza exploded into an impassioned outburst--varying styles of pizzicato, and a his flawless realization of a fantastically difficult simultaneous pizz and arco section highlighted the amazing breadth of the palette from which Moser can draw. His tenure as OSO's artist-in-residence should be an exciting and rewarding one indeed.

The overture from Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Festival closed out the evening. Concert master Sarah Kwak was in fine form with several lonely, mysterious solo segments, and the trombones were simply glorious in their perfect unisons. This was a great showcase for the ensemble, and an energetic finale to a fascinating, daring and diverse all-around program from Maestro Kalmar and Co.

Today's Birthdays

Christoph Graupner (1683-1760)
Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749)
Vassili Kalinnikov (1866-1901)
Richard Addinsell (1904-1977)
Daniil Shafran (1923-1997)
Renato Bruson (1936)
Paavo Heininen (1938)
William Duckworth (1943-2012)
Richard Blackford (1954)
Wayne Marshall (1961)
Juan Diego Flórez (1973)

and

Horatio Alger (1832-1899)
Lorrie Moore (1957)

Today's Birthdays

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739)
Jacques Duphly (1715-1789)
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948)
Pierre Bernac (1899-1979)
William Pleeth (1916-1999)
Leo Smit (1921-1999)
Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
Salvatore Martirano (1927-1995)
Anne Howells (1941)
Viktoria Postnikova (1944)
Lori Laitman (1955)

and

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
Jack London (1876-1916)
Haruki Murakami (1949)

Today's Birthdays

Christian Sinding (1856-1941)
Reihold Glière (1875-1956)
Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)
Mark DeVoto (1940)
York Höller (1944)
Drew Minter (1955)
Alex Shapiro (1962)

and

William James (1842-1910)
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)
Alan Paton (1903-1988)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1925, Copland's Symphony for Organ and Orchestra was premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City by the New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch, with Nadia Boulanger the soloist.

Today's Birthdays

Jean Martinon (1910-1976)
Sidney Griller (1911-1993)
Dean Dixon (1915-1976)
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011)
Max Roach (1924-2007)
Sherrill Milnes (1935)
Rod Stewart (1945)
James Morris (1947)
Mischa Maisky (1948)
Rockwell Blake (1951)
Charles Norman Mason (1955)
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (1961)

and

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)
Philip Levine (1928-2015)
Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002)

Chamber Music Northwest names new artistic directors

From the press release:

Chamber Music Northwest is pleased to announce that it has selected Gloria Chien and Soovin Kim as its next artistic directors to succeed current Artistic Director David Shifrin after his final Summer Festival in 2020! A husband and wife team, both are internationally-renowned performers – Gloria a pianist, Soovin a violinist – and experienced music presenters. Gloria and Soovin are co-artistic directors of the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, founded by Soovin in 2008. Gloria is also the artistic director of the String Theory chamber music series in Chattanooga, TN – which she founded in 2009 – and has been director of the Chamber Music Institute of the Music@Menlo Festival since 2010.

Chamber Music Northwest Executive Director Peter Bilotta says “We are very pleased that the opportunity to lead Chamber Music Northwest drew interest from many of today’s top musical artists. From a field of exceptional musicians and artistic leaders, we are confident we’ve made the best choice for Chamber Music Northwest’s next chapter, and are thrilled to have Gloria and Soovin on our team.”

For more than two years, Chamber Music Northwest has conducted a thorough, international search for its new artistic director. Gloria and Soovin will assume the artistic director position after David Shifrin, Chamber Music Northwest’s artistic director for nearly 40 seasons, steps down after the 2020 Summer Festival.

“I have been honored to share my talents and artistic vision with Chamber Music Northwest audiences for the past 40 years and am proud of how Chamber Music Northwest has grown and evolved in that time” says David Shifrin. “I have collaborated with both Gloria and Soovin on many occasions. I am very proud to have performed at the first Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival and first season of String Theory in Chattanooga. I brought Gloria to Chamber Music Northwest as a Protégé Project artist and Soovin to the Chamber Music Society Two program at Lincoln Center. Gloria and Soovin have become an amazing force in service of the future of chamber music. I am confident they will bring the greatest music and finest musicians to Portland for years to come.”

“Under David’s leadership, Chamber Music Northwest has become one of the most important American chamber music institutions” says Soovin Kim. “Chamber Music Northwest’s vibrancy is closely tied to the artistic values of the Portland community. Gloria and I relish the idea of accepting the baton of leadership from David and nurturing those values while injecting a new energy and fresh perspective that will transform Portland well into the 21st century.”

Gloria and Soovin will perform under Shifrin’s artistic leadership at Chamber Music Northwest’s 2019 and 2020 Summer Festivals, and then succeed him as artistic directors in the fall of 2020. In the interim, they will begin their own artistic planning for their first Chamber Music Northwest Summer Festival in 2021.

Carlos Kalmar interviewed in Chicago Tribune

Kalmar talks about the expansion of the Grant Park Music Festival in this Chicago Tribune article. Sounds like the Festival is doing great things. Kalmar is in his 20th season there as its artistic director and principal conductor.

Today's Birthdays

John Knowles Paine (1839-1906)
Rudolf Bing (1902-1997)
Herva Nelli (1909-1994)
Henriette Puig‑Roget (1910-1992)
Pierre Pierlot (1921-2007)
Joan Baez (1941)
Scott Walker (1944)
Jimmy Page (1944)
Waltraud Meier (1956)
Hillevi Martinpelto (1958)
Nicholas Daniel (1962)

and

Karel Čapek (1890-1938)
Kurt Tucholsky (1890-1935)
Richard Halliburton (1901-1939)
Brian Friel (1929-2015)
Michiko Kakutani (1955)

Today's Birthdays

Jean Gilles (1668-1705)
Lowell Mason (1792-1872)
Sigismond Thalberg (1812-1871)
Hans von Bülow (1830-1894)
Jaromir Weinberger (1896-1967)
Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988)
Giorgio Tozzi (1923-2011)
Robert Starer (1924-2001)
Benjamin Lees (1924-2010)
Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
Zdeněk Mácal (1936)
Robert Moran (1937)
Evgeny Nesterenko (1938)
Elijah Moshinsky (1946)
Paul Dresher (1951)
Vladimir Feltsman (1952)

and

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)
Bronislava Nijinska (1891-1972)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1923, the first broadcast in England of an opera direct from a concert hall took place, Mozart's "The Magic Flute" via the BBC from London.

Today's Birthdays

Clara Haskil (1895-1960)
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963)
John Brownlee (1900-1969)
Nicanor Zabaleta (1907-1993)
Günter Wand (1912-2002)
Ulysses Kay (1917-1995)
John Lanigan (1921-1996)
Jean-Pierre Rampal (1922-2000)
Tommy Johnson (1935-2006)
Iona Brown (1941-2004)
Richard Armstrong (1943)

and

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)
Nicholson Baker (1957)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1955, Marian Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Ulrica in Verdi's "Un Ballo in Mascera" (A Masked Ball). She was the first African-American singer to perform as an opera soloist on the Met stage. Subsequent distinguished African-American singers who performed as members of the Met company included Robert McFerrin, Sr. (Bobby McFerrin Jr.’s father), Leontyne Price, Martina Arroyo, Kahtleen Battle and Jessye Norman.

Today's Birthdays

Max Bruch (1838-1920)
Xaver Scharwenka (1850-1924)
Georges Martin Witkowski (1867-1943)
Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915)
Karl Straube (1873-1950)
Earl Kim (1920-1998)
David Bernstein (1942)
Alexander Baillie (1956)

and

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)
Wright Morris (1910-1998)
E. L. Doctorow (1931-1915)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1733, this notice appears in the Leipzig newspaper Nachtricht auch Frag u. Anzeiger: "Tonight at 8 o'clock there will be a Bach Concert at the Zimmermann Coffeehouse on Catharine Street". This presumably featured secular vocal works, chamber music and concertos performed by the Leipzig Collegium, an ensemble directed by J.S. Bach.

Today's Birthdays

Johann Georg Pisendel (1687-1755)
Constanza Mozart (1762-1842)
Peter Wolle (1792-1871)
Frederick Converse (1871-1940)
Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951)
Nicolai Roslavets (1881-1944)
Reginald Smith-Brindle (1917-2003)
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1920-1995)
Laszlo Heltay (1930)
Alfred Brendel (1931)
Maurizio Pollini (1942)

and
br> Stella Gibbons(1902-1989)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990)
W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009)
Umberto Eco (1932-2016)
Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1938)
Charlie Rose (1942)

Today's Birthdays

Giovanni Pergolesi (1710-1736)
Johann Friedrich Agricola (1720-1774)
Josef Suk (1874-1935)
Frank Wess (1922-2013)
Grace Bumbry (1937)
Joseph Turrin (1947)
Margaret Marshall (1949)
Ronald Corp (1951)
Peter Seiffert (1954)
Boris Berezovsky (1969)

and

Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727)
Jacob Grimm (1785-1863)
Louis Braille (1809-1852)
Augustus John (1878-1961)
Doris Kearns Goodwin (1943)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1950, RCA announces it will produce long play records as Columbia did two years earlier (RCA had unsuccessfully attempted to compete with Columbia's new 33.3-rpm LPs by issuing some of their classical catalog as multiple disc 45-rpm sets).

Today's Birthdays

Victor Borge (1909-2000)
Ronald Smith (1922-2004)
Sir George Martin (1926-2016)
H. K. Gruber (1943)
David Atherton (1944)

and

J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973)

and from the Composers Datebook:

On this date in the year 1843 in Paris, the comic opera “Don Pasquale” by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti received its first performance.
also:

On this day in 1925, German conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwängler made his American debut, conducting the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall.

Today's Birthdays

Frantisek Xaver Brixi (1732-1771)
Mily Balakirev (1837-1910)
Michael Tippett (1905-1998)
Barbara Pentland (1912-2000)
Gardner Read (1913-2005)
Irina Arkhipova (1925-2010)
Alberto Zedda (1928-2017)
Peter Eötvös (1944)
Janet Hilton (1945)
Vladimir Ovchinnikov (1958)
Tzimon Barto (1963)
Robert Fertitta (1970)
Eric Whitacre (1970)

and

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)
Christopher Durang (1949)
Lynda Barry (1956)

and from the Composer's Datebook:

On today’s date in 1843, Richard Wagner’s opera “The Flying Dutchman” had its premiere performance in Dresden.

Today's Birthdays

Charles Racquet (1598-1664)
Frederick William Gaisberg (1873-1951)
Edwin Franko Goldman (1878-1956)
Artur Rodzinski (1892-1958)
Erich Schmid (1907-2001)
Trude Rittmann (1908-2005)
Milt Jackson (1923-1999)
Richard Verreau (1926-2005)
Maurice Béjart (1927-2007)
Bernard Greenhouse (1916-2011)
Alberto Portugheis (1941)

and

E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1585, composer Giovanni Gabrieli becomes the second organist at St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. His uncle, the composer Andrea Gabrieli, is the first organist.

On this day in 1908, Gustav Mahler made his conducting debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, leading a performance of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde."

Today's Birthdays

Caroline Miolan‑Carvalho (1827-1895)
Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950)
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940)
Nathan Milstein (1904-1992)
Jule Styne (1925-1994)
Jaap Schröder (1925)
Odetta (1930-2008)
Stephen Cleobury (1948)
Donna Summer (1948-2012)
Jennifer Higdon (1962)

and

Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Nicholas Sparks (1965)
Junot Díaz (1968)

Portland State University Opera has surreal fun with Poulenc opera

Portland State University Opera ventured into the realm of opéra bouffe (French operetta) with a rousing performance of Francis Poulenc’s “Les Mamelles de Tirésias” (“The Breasts of Tiresias”) on December 8 at the Lincoln Studio Theater. Now before you start thinking that this production was some sort of strip show, you should know that the work was based on a play of the same name by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term “surreal” to describe it. The story takes place in the town of Zanzibar where Thérèse, bored of being a woman, decides change her sex. Her breasts (two balloons) float away while she sings a waltz to them, and then she leaves town. Her husband, assuming that she has been abducted, responds by wearing her clothing. He then becomes the paterfamilias to a ridiculously large horde, giving birth single-handedly to thousands of children in 24 hours. Thérèse, alias Tiresias returns to town as a fortuneteller and reunites with her husband. In the meantime, things happen to other characters that are absurdly entertaining.

The other big factor affecting “Les Mamelles de Tirésias” was WWII, which had taken a great toll on France’s population. Poulenc finished writing the work in 1944, and its main message is to go out and make babies. So, despite the comic and nonsensical goings on, the underlying theme has a seriousness that must have caused a lot of head-nodding in the audience when it was premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1947.

Directed by Rebecca Hermann, a strong cast of singers tackled “Les Mamelles de Tirésias” with enthusiasm that seemed a bit overstressed at times. Maeve Stier, as the Theater Director, got things off to an excellent start with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes as she exhorted the audience to “make babies now as never before.” Savannah Panah’s Thérèse generated laughter when she released her balloons while serenading them with a waltz and then followed it with “I feel masculine.” The vignette involving Monsieur Lacouf (Ben Trombi) and Monsieur Presto (Eric Olson), who kill each other (using balloon guns) over roulette was oddly amusing. Their physical agility was matched by Erik Standifird as the Husband, who applied his stentorian high baritone to great effect. He counted on some of his many children to support him in his old age, including the Son (Nicholas Wavers), who skillfully cleared many high notes with an impressive falsetto. A gendarme (Jonny Roberts), newspaper vendor (Lydia O’Brien), and reporter (Kate Ledington) rounded out the principals with spirited singing and lots of movement.

Since the Lincoln Studio Theater does not have an orchestra pit, Chuck Dillard conducted while seated in the front row. Pianist James Pick provided expert accompaniment and gamely wore a baby’s cap in the second act. A large babe crib, festooned with pink and blue balloons, plus a table and a couple of chairs were all of the props that the singers needed. Poulenc’s music skipped from waltzes to polkas and other styles that are part and parcel of French comic operettas – yet he made them his own, and they were thoroughly delightful right up to the last admonition: “You must make babies now as you never have before!”

Today's Birthdays

William Croft (1678-1727)
André Messager (1853-1929)
Joseph Bohuslav Foerster (1859-1951)
Alfred Einstein (1880-1952)
Dmitri Kabalevsky (1904-1987)
Paul Bowles (1910-1999)
Sir David Willcocks (1919-2015)
Bo Diddley (1928-2008)
Bruno Canino (1935)
June Anderson (1950)
Stephen Jaffe (1954)
Antonio Pappano (1959)

and

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Sara Lidman (1923-2004)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1879 was the premiere of Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta "The Pirates of Penzance," in Paignton at the Royal Bijou (partial preview to insure British copyright). The first full performance of the new work occurred at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York City the following day, with Sullivan conducting and Gilbert in attendance. The New York premiere was arranged to register American copyright of the new work and pre-empt unauthorized "pirate" productions in the U.S..

Today's Birthdays

Tomás Bretón (1850-1923)
Pablo Casals (1876-1973)
Lionel Tertis (1876-1975)
Yves Nat (1890-1956)
Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990)
Billy Tipton (1914-1989)

and

William Gaddis (1922-1998)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1903 took place the first concert by the Seattle Symphony at Christensen's Hall in Seattle under the baton of violinist Harry F. West. The program includes music of Massenet, Bruch, Schubert and Rossini.

Today's Birthdays

Christian Cannabich (1731-1798)
Julius Rietz (1812-1877)
B. J. Lang (1837-1909)
Francesco Tamagno (1850-1905)
Roger Sessions (1896-1985)
Earl "Fatha" Hines (1905-1983)
Johnny Otis (1921-2012)
Nigel Kennedy (1956)

and

Charles Portis (1933)

Today's Birthdays

Sir John Goss (1800-1880)
Tito Schipa (1888-1965)
Marlene Dietrich (1904-1992)
Oscar Levant (1906-1972)

and

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Wilfrid Sheed (1930-2011)
Chris Abani (1966)
Sarah Vowell (1969)

And from the Composers Datebook:

On this day in 1841, Franz Liszt performs at the Singakademie in Berlin. Women swooned and the general audience reacts with such uncontrolled enthusiasm that Heinrich Heine coins the term "Lisztomania" to describe their fanatical devotion to the performer, which soon swept through most of Europe.

Today's Birthdays

Leopold Mannes (1899-1964)
Maurice Gendron (1920-1990)
Thea King (1925-2007)
Earle Brown (1926-2002)
Phil Specter (1940)
Wayland Rogers (1941)
Harry Christophers (1953)
Andre-Michel Schub (1953)

and

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
Henry Miller (1891-1980)
Jean Toomer (1894-1867)
Juan Felipe Herrera (1948)
David Sedaris (1958)