CRPDX presents Bach's Coffee Cantata, other works this Sunday

Press Release from Classical Revolution Portland:

Remember how last winter's "winter blast" ruined everything fun you had planned for two weeks straight? We certainly do, especially the cancellation of Bachxing day, which actually turned into "Vlaxing Day" due to the hardcore nature of the violists in the group. Now that it's March, we are certain this gorgeous weather won't prevent anyone from getting to our show. (well, gorgeous in comparison?)

I digress... It's time to celebrate Bach, just in time for his birthday! Classical Revolution is pleased to present Bachxing Day version 2.1 at the Someday Lounge on 3/15 at 9pm.

Members of Classical Revolution PDX will perform their own interpretations of (but not limited to) Bach concertos, cello suites, harpsichord solos, and we're especially excited about our dramatic performance of his coffee cantata. "If I can't drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat" - an actual line from the libretto, I'm not making this up!

Audience can join in on the fun by creating ridiculous Bach names, puns and haikus to win prizes generously donated by Classical Millennium.

Sunday, March 15th
The Someday Lounge
125 NW 5th AvePortland, OR 97209
$5 cover. 9pm start time

For more information please visit somedaylounge.com or call 503.248.1030

Happy Bachxing Day!!

Mattie-- Mattie Kaiser

"Viva la Revolution!!"
http://www.classicalrevolutionpdx.org/

Today's Birthdays

Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838)
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)

Bach Cantata Choir to give Lenten concert this Sunday

Press Release from the Bach Cantata Choir:


The Bach Cantata Choir will present a Lenten concert featuring two cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach on Sunday, March 15 from 2:00pm-3:00pm at Rose City Park Presbyterian Church, 1907 NE 45th Ave in Portland, Oregon. The concert, under the direction of conductor Ralph Nelson, will feature a performance of Bach’s Cantata #12, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”, Cantata #131 “Aus der Tiefen rufe ich”, and “Herzlich lieb hab ich dich” -- a rarely heard motet for double choir by the German composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). The concert is free and open to the public. A free-will offering will be taken. Doors open at 1:30pm.

Featured in major solos in the Bach cantatas will be alto Irene Weldon, tenor Byron Wright and baritone Jacob Herbert. Also singing smaller roles in Cantata #131 will be soprano Elise Groves, alto Elizabeth Farquhar, tenor Mark Woodward, and bass Uwe Haefker. The works will be accompanied by a small chamber orchestra. John Vergin will provide the organ continuo. This concert features the Bach Cantata Choir – a choir of 50 professional or semi-professional voices, drawn from many of Portland’s finest choirs.

Bach’s sacred cantatas were written to be performed as part of the Lutheran Church liturgy. Cantata #12, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (“Weeping, Wailing, Fretting, Fearing”) dates from 1714 and, though written originally for the 3rd Sunday after Easter, is closely associated with Lent. In 1747, Bach reworked the first movement of this cantata – it became the famous “Crucifixus” in his Mass in B Minor.

Bach’s Cantata #131, “Aus der Tiefen ruhe ich” (“Out of the Depths I Cry to Thee”) is a setting of Psalm 130 and is considered by scholars to be the first cantata that Bach wrote -- written in 1707 when Bach was 22 years old and working as organist in the small town of Mühlhausen. Although not particularly tied to any one Sunday in the church year, scholars believe it may have been written for a service following a devastating fire.

Talking with Sharin Apostolou about Portland Opera's La Calisto

Portland Opera is reaching way back into the past to bring something new to Portland, mounting a production of “La Calisto” a Venetian-Baroque opera that was written by Francesco Cavalli in 1651. For this production, Portland Opera is collaborating with Portland Baroque Orchestra to create an ensemble of 17th Century instrument specialists, including cornetto virtuoso Bruce Dickey who is based in Venice, Italy, to give you a real Baroque experience.

Most of the singing in La Calisto will be provided by members of the Portland Opera Studio Artists program, including Sharin Apostolou, the vivacious soprano who, last season, did an amazing job of stepping in at the last minute to sing the title role in Portland Opera’s “Rhodelinda.” This time, Apostolou will sing the title role in “La Calisto,” and I recently talked with her at Portland Opera’s offices.

How long have you been studying for your part in La Calisto?

Apostolou: I started studying La Calisto during The Turn of the Screw; so it was the middle of January. That wasn’t an ideal situation, because all of the Studio Opera singers have had a very busy season.

What is the vocal range for your part in this opera?

Apostolou: The top is a high B-flat, and it’s an ornament. It’s not written in the score. Middle Cs are the lowest notes. That’s usually not where my voice likes to live, but I love singing this work. It has a speech-like quality to it.

What is Calisto’s character like?

Apostolou: She goes through quite a change in the opera. First of all she is daughter of King Lykaon who served Jove a meal of human flesh. So Calisto ran away from her family and became a follower of the Diana, the goddess of the hunt.

Calisto is very strong willed but very naïve. She is a chaste follower of Diana, but then she meets Jove and everything gets turned on its head. She can’t tell the difference between the real Diana and the Jove-Diana, and they treat her in polar opposite ways. Then Jove’s wife, Juno, finds out what’s going on, and Calisto doesn’t realize who she is and spills the beans, and gets turned into a bear. Such is the way of the gods.

This opera has comedy and tragedy in it. Do you prefer one over the other?

Apostolou: I like both comedy and tragedy. My voice sort of leans towards comedy – to the girls who get married at the end, more than the girls who die at the end. There’s a joke among sopranos that you know that you’ve grown up when you go from the girls who marry to the girls who die.

Tell us more about the demands of this opera.

Apostolou: Baroque is not necessarily a different way of singing, but a different mind-set. Robert Ainsley, our conductor, has been a tremendous help. He is an absolute expert in this style of music. He has taught us how to learn the music. In Mozart and Handel, there’s a lot of give and take. Baroque doesn’t allow for you to play with the notes on the page. But you don’t have to. Monteverdi, Cavalli, and their contemporaries wrote the rhythms exactly how they wanted the speech to sound. So you can play with the tempi, but the music just sings itself. When you try it, you find that it does really work that way.

The Venetian-Baroque style has a lot of recitative. I have more arias than most of the characters in La Calisto. But it’s not like the way we normally think of arias, not like Mozart or even Handel. This opera is very speech driven. You don’t use ten measures to sing a sentence, you sing it in three. So the plot is constantly being pushed along.

My character has small moments of reflection, and it’s usually before something big happens. My last aria is about a page and a half of repose, taking everything that has been going on and processing it, and that’s when Juno comes in with the furies and turns me into a bear.

You won the Met competition in Oregon and did pretty well at the regional in Seattle as well. Congratulations!

Apostolou: Thanks! I won the encouragement award in Seattle, and it was a lot of fun. It was on my birthday, too. The singing there was amazing. We just went out there and did our best.

Are you planning to enter more competitions?

Apostolou: Yes, I plan to do more, like the Giulio Gari competition in New York City in May. Competitions can be a good way to get your name out there. Being a finalist helps to make people take notice.

After you appear in Portland Opera’s Rigoletto, your time with the Studio Artists program comes to an end. So what are your next steps?

Apostolou: This summer, I’ll sing in two productions at the Green Mountain Opera festival in Vermont. I’m Barbarina in Nozze de Figaro and Andina in the Elixir of Love.

How did you choose to become an opera singer? Did you grow up singing a lot?

Apostolou: I started off dancing. I was a very energetic child. My parents enrolled me in dance class. I loved it and got into theater doing dance and musicals. Everybody did choir. The public schools in New Jersey had a very strong music program. Then I went to high school, a private school, and they took all everyone involved in the music program to see the dress rehearsals at the Met. That’s when I fell in love with opera and became obsessed with it. The Magic Flute was the first opera that I had ever seen – I was just 14 - and I came back home and told my parents that I was going to become and opera singer. And they said, okay! Go ahead and try and see what happens. I applied to music schools and went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, they have an excellent drama and music programs in the country. Then I got my masters from the Manhattan School of Music.

I was a Central City Opera for two summers and in the outreach program at Tulsa Opera before coming to Portland.

You’re a die hard!

Apostolou: (Laughs) Yes, we just keep pressing on. After Vermont, I’m moving to New York and will audition and see what happens.

Good luck with everything!

Apostolou: Thanks! See you at the opera!

Today's Birthdays

Archie Camden (1888-1979)
Dame Isobel Baillie (1895-1983)
Samuel Barber 1910-1981)
David Matthews (1943)
Kalevi Aho (1949)
Howard Shelley (1950)

and

Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512)
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)

Portland Youth Philharmonic – These kids can play!

A large crowd assembled at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Saturday evening to hear the Portland Youth Philharmonic’s winter concert and to acknowledge the contributions of one of its former conductors, Jacob Avshalomov, who had become somewhat estranged from the orchestra since his retirement in 1995. The orchestra gave Avshalomov (who will turn 90 on March 28th) its lifetime achievement award and performed the world premiere of his “Season’s Greetings. The program also included works by Modest Mussorgsky, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Samuel Barber, whose Concerto for Violin and Orchestra was given an incredible performance by the PYP’s 15 year-old concertmaster Brandon Garbot.

The Portland Youth Philharmonic, founded in 1924, happens to be the oldest youth orchestra in the nation and has always maintained a high level of playing. Under its new conductor, David Hattner, the orchestra showed its sensitive side with its handling of Mussorgsky’s Prelude to “Khovantchina,” which evokes the dawn rising over Moscow.

Garbot excelled in every moment of in the Barber Violin Concerto. In particular, his lyricism in the first movement soared and the exacting, fast, pace of the third movement was like butter in his hands. He played with impeccable tone throughout. It was a breathtaking performance and truly memorable. The orchestra, for its part, supported his playing extremely well.

Avshalomov’s “Season’s Greetings” seemed to be a pastiche of different ideas that were inspired by the poetry of his wife, Doris. Over five movements, dissonant and harmonic sounds careened throughout the orchestra. The references to Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet” added a dash of warmth, and piece concluded charmingly with a wink rather than a grandiose chords.

The concert ended with a Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, which the orchestra played with passion. I loved the enthusiasm of the musicians, especially in the strings, who clearly enjoyed digging into this masterpiece. The brass and wind sections had many fine moments. Hattner encouraged his orchestra effectively, and together, they demonstrated a commitment to the music that would’ve made Tchaikovsky proud.

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Extra note:

One of the appealing things about a PYP concert is the program booklet, because the program notes are written by the musicians. The booklet also contains advertisements from universities, conservatories, and music summer camps. It’s wonderful to see that these schools offer a future for young musicians in Portland.

Today's Birthdays

Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000)
Dick Hyman (1927)
Robert Tear (1939)
Barthold Kuijken (1949)
Simon Halsey (1958)

and

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935)
John McPhee (1933)

Today's Birthdays

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Christopher Seaman (1942)
Uri Segal (1944)
Nicholas Kraemer (1945)
Clive Gillinson (1946)
Okko Kamu (1946)
Michael Chance (1955)

and

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

Oregon Cultural Distrust

Just in case you haven't heard the Oregon State Legislature has gone ahead and approved the looting of the Oregon Cultural Trust to the tune of $1.8 million to help out the budget. I know that they are trying the spread the burden, but the Trust was set up in order to be helpful to the arts in difficult times exactly like this one. Oregon has always been one of the most feeble states in the Union in terms of supporting the arts. This action should shove us to the bottom of the barrel.

If you want to read more, Bob Hicks of Art Scatter provides a definitive assessment of the situation here.

Today's Birthdays

Julius Rudel (1921)
Sarah Caldwell (1924-2006)
Ronald Stevenson (1928)
Lorin Maazel (1930)
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa (1944)
Marielle Labèque (1952)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin (1975)

and

Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655)
Gabriel García Márquez (1928)
Willie Mays (1931)
Dick Fosbury (1947)

Today's Birthdays

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)

Dawn Upshaw mesmerizes audience with intimate, pure artistry

A great artist can give a concert for a thousand people yet make it seem as if she is performing just for you. Such is the artistry of Dawn Upshaw, who appeared yesterday (Tuesday, March 3) evening at the Newmark Theatre in a concert sponsored by the Friends of Chamber Music. Upshaw showed an incredible ability to connect with the audience in spite of singing music that was relatively unknown. In a program that included works by Charles Ives, Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, Osvaldo Golijov, and George Crumb, it would have been easy for Upshaw to just park and bark – make some beautiful tones and take some bows. But she expressed the music not just with her voice but with every gesture, facial expression, and the way she stood. And the total effect was amazing because Upshaw did all of this in a hall that is very dry (no reverberation whatsoever) and in which it is difficult to create a warm tone (the Newmark has lots of carpeting and was made for plays rather than for music).

Upshaw, and her accompanist Gilbert Kalish, drew the audience into an impressionist soundscape that began with a selection of songs by Ives. This selection transitioned from songs that had a more traditional, harmonic sound (like “Songs My Mother Taught Me” and “Two little flowers”) to some that were somewhat dissonant yet intimate (like “Rather Sad” and “Tom Sails Away”). Kalish supported each piece perfectly with a subtle touch that always added to the words and the atmosphere.

With the aide of a microphone, Kalish mentioned that Ives wrote 140 songs and had a fierce independent streak. His remarks served as an introduction to “The Alcotts” movement from Ives’s “Concord Sonata.” Kalish used a light touch to evoke the parlor room and everyday atmosphere of the Alcott home in his playing of this gem.

Next, Upshaw sang a several songs by French composers, and since the house lights were turned almost all the way down, it was impossible to follow the translation. Yet, that didn’t matter at all, because Upshaw has a way of drawing you into the world of the music that she sings. I think that in both of the Messiaen’s pieces, “Le collier” (“The necklace”) and “Prière exaucée” (“Fulfilled prayer”), she pulled some high notes out of no where and then expanded on them in an exquisite way that was absolutely thrilling.

After intermission, Kalish performed a movement from Abel Decaux’s “Clairs de lune.” Kalish’s light touch on the keyboard nicely matched the slow-moving sounds of this piece, making it easy to imagine a moon hanging over a cloudless night or another nighttime tableau.

As a preface to the next piece, Golijov’s “Lúa Descorlorida” (“Moon, Colorless”), Upshaw explained that Golijov wrote it for Kalish and her and that it is the piece that she has performed the most often at her concerts. Although the text of the music is sad, telling about a woman who wants to be removed from the earth, the music has an improvised feel and is not a downer. Upshaw really captured the full range of emotion in this song, and, for me, it was the highlight of the evening.

The program closed with the six songs from Crumb’s “Apparition.” For this music, the piano top was removed so that Kalish could strum and pluck the piano strings and rap the inside of the piano with his knuckles. Some of the text required Upshaw to use a Sprechstimme (speaking voice) and at other times she sang non-sense syllables. There was real text to be sung also, but it seemed secondary. The songs dealt with silence and death and serious matters, and the music was sort of other-worldly.

The audience soaked up this unusual piece and responded with long-lasting applause. Kalish and Upshaw returned to sing two encores. Both were William Bolcom cabaret songs: “Watin” and “Black Max,” and the latter really lightened up the evening and put everyone in a good mood for the journey home.

Inside Chamber Music with Hamilton Cheifetz

For the past several years, cellist and professor Hamilton Cheifetz teaches a class on chamber music. A neighbor of mine took the class a couple of years ago and highly recommends it. For $100 you get eight informative classes taught by Cheifetz, in-class performances by Cheifetz, Janet Guggenheim, Carol Sindell, and other top-tier musicians, and discounted tickets to chamber music concerts.

The classes run from Marc 30 to May 18 and take place on Mondays from 5:30 to 7 pm in room 183 of the Extended Studies Building (1633 SW Park Ave.) on the campus of Portland State University. For more information, click here.

Today's Birthdays

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Cecil Aronowitz (1916-1978)
Bernard Haitnik (1929)
Aribert Reimann (1936)
Ralph Kirshbaum (1946)

and

Khaled Hosseini (1965)

Oregon legistlature still intent on raiding Cultural Trust funds

The folks at Art Scatter and Culture Shock have been monitoring how our representatives in Salem intend to divert funds from the Oregon Cultural Trust to bridge the budget gap. Please take a look at these blogs and protest this action, which is coming up for a vote on Friday.

Today's Birthdays

Henry Wood (1869-1944)
Frank Wigglesworth (1918)
Martin Lovett (1927)
Florence Quivar (1944)
Roberta Alexander (1949)
Katia Labèque (1950)

and

James Merrill (1926-1995)

CD Review: Handel's Acis und Galatea (version by Mendelssohn Bartholdy)

In 2005, a music antiquarian discovered an arrangement by Mendelssohn Bartholdy of Handel’s masque Acis and Galatea. While other Handel arrangements by Mendelssohn are known, it is believed that this was the first time this particular music had seen the light of day since its London run in 1869.

The Handel festival in Göttingen immediately acquired the music and approached renowned Handel interpreter Nicholas McGegan, and they presented the first modern performance of this work in May of last year. The Norddeutschen Rundfunk Chor and the FestspielOrchester Göttingen teamed up with McGegan to produce this CD, released on the Carus-Verlag label.

McGegan approaches the work with brisk baroque bombast; Handel's more spare orchestration has been fleshed out with timpani, horns, clarinets and other instruments. McGegan’s irascible personality and ebullient conducting style are readily apparent on this disc. Bright, lively tempos abound; he seems to revel in the glory of the somewhat cliche pastoral idyll presented in the opening chorus and indeed the rest of the work. The clear German diction is a pleasure to hear from a native-speaking choir. Most of the soloists are not specifically baroque specialists, which makes good sense considering the interesting idiom of baroque music filtered through the lens of early 19th-century orchestration. Soprano Julia Kleiter particularly stands out with her warm, inviting Galatea. This CD should appeal to those who love Handel, Mendelssohn and/or McGegan.

Perlman has the goods, but doesn’t know where to go with them in concert with the Oregon Symphony

World-famous violinists typically draw big crowds and buckets of adulation, and that was case when Itzhak Perlman stepped on stage to perform with the Oregon Symphony on Saturday (February 28). A standing ovation greeted Perlman, who had appeared in the national broadcast at President Obama’s inauguration just a month ago, but his performance as violinist and conductor with the Oregon Symphony, though it had some fine moments, didn’t have enough shape and verve to make the evening memorable.

The program featured Bach’s Concerto No 1 for violin and string orchestra, Schubert’s Symphony No 3, and Brahms Symphony No. 2. A first-rate conductor would bring out all sorts of nuances in each work and place a personal stamp on it, but Perlman seemed not to have a clue about what he wanted the music to say. The volume for each piece was medium loud, most movements, once underway, cruised along at the same speed that they started with, and, outside of a soaring horn solo by John Cox in the Brahms – which almost startled the audience out of the doldrums – the entire affair was boring.

As a result, the standing ovations that Perlman and the orchestra received were perfunctory. It was sort of like, hey, we’ve got this great artist in our midst and we’re really happy that he stopped by our little town, so let’s shower him with affection. If anyone should receive extra helpings of applause, it should be concertmaster Jun Iwasaki, who used his entire body to help keep the violins together. There were times, especially in the Brahms, when the violins laid down a silky smooth and golden sound that is just pure pleasure, but these pieces needed more than just some beautiful phrases. Even the Bach Violin Concerto, with Perlman sitting on a raised platform where the concertmaster usually sits, didn’t go anywhere in particular despite the gorgeous tones from his Strad. When the ensemble reached the last note, the piece just ended, but nobody was elevated.

One little interesting point in the performance of the Bach was hearing Janet Guggenheim play the harpsichord. Guggenheim was Perlman’s accompanist for many years, but even her presence didn’t alter the final score, so to speak.

Several years ago, Oregon Symphony violinist and Third Angle director Ron Blessinger (who wasn’t playing in the Perlman concert series) told me (and I’m paraphrasing here) that it’s always best when a conductor comes to the orchestra with good ideas for the music, but a conductor with bad ideas is better than a conductor with no ideas, because a conductor with no ideas makes the concert dull as hell.

Today's Birthdays

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)
Kurt Weill (1900-1950)
Marc Blitzstein (1905-1965)
John Gardner (1917)
Robert Simpson (1921-1997)
Bernard Rands(1935)
Robert Lloyd (1940)

and

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

The Concord Ensemble Excels in Portland Debut

Saturday Night, February 28th, marked the Portland debut of the renowned Concord Ensemble, a vocal group loosely based out of Los Angeles. Concord baritone Aaron Cain, a recent transplant to Portland, would be to familiar to local early music and choral concertgoers, as he has been performing with Cappella Romana (the sponsor of this concert) since coming to Portland.

The sanctuary at St. Philip Neri Church in SE Portland was the backdrop for a concert entitled "The Palm Tree, the Crossbar: Music for Holy Week from the New World." The concert had originally been subtitled "The Passion According to St. Mark." This must have been changed since the complete passion presented was actually after St. Matthew. In both the program and a flier there was reference made to New World music of Indian (Native American) and African origin, so it was a bit confusing that there was no music bearing discernible earmarks of either culture to be found anywhere in the performance. That said, the music presented was spectacular.

From the opening, the Concord Ensemble displayed a blend that bordered on the miraculous. One of the pieces presented was a Lamentatio Hieremiae Prophetae by Mexican-born composer Francisco Lopez y Capillas (1605-1674). The ensemble's ability to switch back and forth from the perfect unison intonation in Gregorian style to the lush Renaissance polyphony without skipping a beat was a pleasure to hear. The lag time between European and New World compositional style was often a couple of decades, as the program noted, so the style was not of the middle Baroque as one might expect to hear from a European composer working in this time period. The anachronistic style of the American composers was one of the hallmarks of the concert.


The Concord Ensemble did not provide any fanciness or frills; there was no undue showing off of individual vocal talents. The ability of this group to get out of the way of the music and allow it to speak for itself even while performing is a difficult skill to master, and CE was flawless in that respect: the works were thereby presented as a radiant whole whose meaning was clear. They sang these motets and other works of dizzying complexity with a degree of polish so as to make it sound effortless.

A number of motets and hymns were presented in the first half, but the heart of the program, the Pasion segun San Mateo by an anonymous Mexican composer, was the central feature of the second half.

The structure was as follows: a narrator (tenor Pablo Cora) sung in plainchant all the narrative from the Passion reading. The rest of the group (except for Cain) formed the Synagoga who sang all words except those of Jesus. The baritone role of Jesus was sung by Cain.

Cain's delivery was straightforward and arresting. Richly resonant without being overdone, he provided the perfect voice for this role. While some of the music behind Jesus' words was somewhat static, Cain used every opportunity available to bring out key phrases. The powerful Paters in which Jesus addresses his father were particularly memorable.

In addition to singing the words of Caiaphas, Peter, the scribes and Pharisees, Pontius Pilate and the various other actors in the Passion, the Synagoga provided the aural halo for the words of Jesus, an intriguing and awe-inspiring effect. In some ways this group had the most interesting singing musically, and they gave an animated performance that broke up the sometimes monotonous Narrator-Jesus repartee.

Cora as the narrator was presented with perhaps the most difficult task: the plainchant form taken by the narration made the driest baroque recitativo secco seem infinitely variable by comparison. He sang very ably, using subtle shifts in timbre and dramatic pauses, and highlighting the little pitch variation there was to inject what color and shading he could. After the Passion ended, Cora quipped that he was "excited that I get to sing another note now." They closed with another Vexilla Regis, this one by Spanish master Tomas Luis de Victoria.

It was indeed a pleasure to hear such an accomplished group singing music that must surely be unfamiliar to many concertgoers. One hopes, since one of their members now sings with Cappella Romana, that this first Portland concert by the Concord Ensemble will not be the last.