Today's Birthdays plus Leap Year's

Geraldine Farrar(1882-1967)
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)
Daniel Handler (1970)

Plus birthdays for February 29th:

Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868)
Jimmy Dorsey (1904-1957)
Reri Grist (1932)

Today's Birthdays

Sir Hubert Parry (1848-1918)
Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976)
Marian Anderson (1897-1993)
Elizabeth Welch (1904-2003)
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)

Today's Birthdays

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

and

Elisabeth George (1949)

Max Raabe: Sauve, sophisticated, hard to pin down

By guest reviewer: Angela Allen

In patent-leather shoes and tails, every hair slicked into place, Max Raabe led two hours of wit, elegance and impeccably presented music from the ‘20s and ‘30s at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

The Oregon Symphony sponsored “A Night in Berlin” on Feb. 24. If only our grandparents had been there! Instead, Raabe and his tuxedoed 12-person Berlin-based Palast Orchester (Palace Orchestra) charmed new generations at its Portland debut.

Never heard of these guys?

The ramrod-straight Raabe, who says it’s fun to be naughty in a tuxedo, has a campy side. He performed at Marilyn Manson’s wedding. He wrote the Britney Spears song, “Oops, I Did It Again.”

Raabe has far more credentials than those.

At 47, he has fronted his band for 22 years and performed for those unimpressed by fly-by-night popular culture. Adding to his high-end Continental entertainment appeal, he is a preservationist of “the most elegant pop music we ever had,” he says. His repertoire of ‘20s and ‘30s tunes will remain in the European and American songbooks.

Raabe and the Palast Orchester have a shtick, though you can’t quite label it. They don’t do jazzy conversational riffs, or big-band orchestral playing, or kitschy cabaret. They don’t sit throughout the entire concert, like the Lawrence Welk guys. They throw in humor and a little slapstick (not too much) such as when the percussionist Vincent Riewe knocked down the chimes one by one, or the entire orchestra performed a tune with bells.

They mix it up, ping-ponging tunes from Europe and America, transporting us from everyday ho-hum life as cabaret music did decades ago in the fraying Weimar Republic. Foxtrots, tangos, rumbas, played with verve and precision, could pull even the most cynical back to the good parts of the tough days.

With big ears and a graceful body that moved from mike to piano (where he leaned, not played) and back again to the spotlight, Raabe resembles a dapper big-eared Fred Astaire with a much better voice. His baritone moved easily into the tenor range and his speaking voice dropped to bass. He introduced every song – about two dozen of them-- often with a clever remark in his slight German accent.

Raabe doesn’t own full-blown operatic chops, though he was trained in opera, or Frank Sinatra/Kurt Elling lyric virtuosity, but he convincingly crooned Kurt Weill’s and Bertholdt Brecht’s “Show Me the Way to the Next Whiskey Bar.” He did a campy take on “Just a Gigolo,” adapted from an Austrian song in the late ‘20s (and made even more famous by Bing Crosby). He charmed the audience with Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” and Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets.” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” proved a crowd-pleaser, but the hot-blooded speedy version of “Avalon” drew the most applause. He sang a number of German tunes as well – auf Deutsch, of course.

Raabe was the big cheese but his versatile orchestra was as polished as its members’ shoes. Almost everyone, all men except the violinist, played at least two instruments, and several members sang a couple of times with Raabe. Jorn Ranke played trombone and viola as well as sang. Bernd Hugo Dieterich picked the bass and blew the sousaphone, and Ulrich Hoffmeier did magic on the guitar, banjo and violin.

Violinist Cecilia Crisafulli, in a backless red gown, emerged as almost a centerpiece (hard to trump the suave Raabe). She is “the queen,” as Raabe says, and she takes the lead after Raabe on curtain calls. Palast has always had a female violinist, and it does add spark (and sparkles).

The most amazing thing? Nobody is directing. There is no maestro. They are so well rehearsed and grooved, who needs it?

The group would have been just as or more impressive in a smaller venue, with my grandparents dancing on the floor.

*****
Angela Allen, a Portland writer and photographer, writes about music, food, art, wine, architecture and style. She received a grant to study music from the National Endowment of the Arts and Columbia University School of Journalism. Find her work at AngelaAllenWrites.com.

Today's Birthdays

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)
Denis O'Neill (1948)
Melinda Wagner (1957)

and

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
Karl Friedrich May (1842–1874)
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)

Today's Birthdays

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

and

Wilhelm (Carl) Grimm (1786-1859)
Judith Butler (1956)

Today's Birthdays

George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
Sir Hugh Roberton (1874-1952)
Albert Sammons (1886-1957)
Dave Apollon (1897-1972)
Martindale Sidwell (1916-1998)
Régine Crespin (1927-2007)

and

Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) - blogger of the 17th Century
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

Today's Birthdays

Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817-1890)
York Bowen (1884-1961)
Benno Moiseiwitsch (1890-1963)
George Zukerman (1927)
Steven Lubin (1942)
Lucy Shelton (1954)
Lowell Liebermann (1961)
Rolando Villazón (1972)

and

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
Edward Gorey (1925-2000)
Ishmael Reed (1938)

Today's Birthdays

Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
Leo Delibes (1836-1891)
Charles Marie Widor (1844-1945)
Kenneth Alford (1881-1945)
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
Elean 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)

The Imani Winds give a remarkable concert at Kaul Auditorium

Occasionally one attends a performance where the the musicianship is of such high caliber, the selections are so varied and engrossing, and the personality of the performers is so engaging that the feeling of it lingers long afterward, like the faint ghost of a warmly remembered dream. The concert by the acclaimed Imani Winds on Saturday night, February 20th in the Kaul Auditorium at Portland’s Reed College, was just such an event.

The performance marked the end of the Imani Winds’ residency at Reed, and was part of Chamber Music Northwest’s ’09-’10 Encore series. All of the music presented was from the 20th and 21st centuries, and three of the night’s offerings were composed by the group’s flutist Valerie Coleman, as well as two with arrangements by the horn player Jeff Scott. ‘Personality’ was a watchword of the evening, referenced by several of the group as each of the five performers stood, one before each work, to speak about the piece to follow.

The only un-introduced work of the evening was the opener, Coleman’s Afro Blue, which began with oboist Toyin Spellman-Diaz wandering nonchalantly onto the stage to begin singing a loud, exuberant melody, rough edges gloriously exposed, based (as was later explained) on the Afro-Cuban religion Santería. One by one the rest of the group filed out and they began playing their instruments in a wild aural jumble, seemingly heedless of each other. Eventually the work developed into a series of arguments, first clarinet vs. oboe, then those two against the flute with bassoon and horn rumbling in the background as if egging on the row. Towards the end the composer invited the audience to join in a call-and-response, which was enthusiastically picked up.

The next work was by Czech composer Karel Husa, a programmatic piece called Five Poems, each of which was based on something to do with the life of birds. It was more than a recitation of bird song notation, though the composer wrote that he used that effect. Put simply, the work presented the spiritual and emotional life of birds. Rapt silence greeted the first poem, Walking Bird, an abstract yet easily idiomatic rendering of birds strolling down the beach—jerky, alien yet humorous. In Interlude: Lamenting Bird and its companion With a Dead Bird, the music turned intensely atmospheric and spooky, a weird, muted wailing emanating from the horn. Fighting Birds was a cacophony of toots, whistles, squawks, shrieks and burps, as well as incredible delicacy from the horn. The group closed the half with a piece commissioned early in their career, Aires Tropicales by Paquito D’Rivera, a piece redolent with Latin American rhythms and themes such as Habanera and Vals Venezolano.

The second half opened with a brutally difficult work by Györgi Ligeti, Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet. A bewildering forest of rasping dissonances, penetrating unisons, sonic experiments and textural adventures, the movements rarely lasted more than a minute or so but were more intense and memorable for their brevity. Forget about tonality; only occasionally did the listener glimpse brief snatches of what could even be called melody. Bassoonist Monica Ellis was intriguing all throughout the evening, bringing forth sounds from her instrument that were nothing short of amazing: angry exclamations, aspirant chuffs, and a muffled tootling enabled by a cloth stuffed into the end of her instrument were just a few of the skills she brought to the Ligeti. The last movement ended with a joke played on the audience. The music came to a pause and the performers all leaned forward, brows furrowed, eyes locked, bodies tensed in preparation for what must surely be a simultaneous explosion from the whole group…then they relaxed, and sat back laughing without sounding another note. It was over.

The next work was a composition of Coleman’s, adapted from a multimedia presentation about the life of chanteuse, dancer and humanitarian Josephine Baker. It consisted of four movements, each telling the story of a different phase of her life. Ol’ St. Louis began with what Coleman described as the music Baker would have heard as a young girl in St. Louis, when street-corner bands were playing the earliest distillations of a new music that would later become jazz. There was great work here for Scott on the horn and Mariam Adam on the clarinet, as they spilled out tune after saucy tune in the old, ‘dirty’ jazz style. In Paris 1925 Coleman gave a nod not only to Baker’s years as Europe’s most popular burlesque dancer, but also conveyed the wide-eyed wonder of a young African American woman encountering a place where the rigid cruelty of American segregation did not apply. The evening closed with Scott’s dexterous arrangement of Astor Piazzola’s popular Libertango.

There was never a doubt that the audience would settle for anything less than an encore, which turned out be another composition by Coleman, an exuberant African-based piece entitled Umojaa, Swahili for ‘unity.’ The performers spoke about personality, their own and that of the music, several times throughout the night. When it is precisely that personality which stands out in the face of such brilliant, difficult music so expertly and sensitively performed, then it was a memorable concert indeed.

Opera Theater Oregon sends up Wagner in 'Das Rheingold'

Photography by Bob Ison of Ice Wolf Photos

On Wednesday night at the Clinton Street Theater in SE Portland, Opera Theater Oregon debuted what must surely be the world premier of any Wagner opera to be set as an episode of the once-popular, vapid TV series Baywatch. Das Rheingold may not seem at first like a suitable thematic partner for a show whose main claim to fame was a horde of buxom young women and bronzed, muscled men running around the beach (often in slow motion) rescuing people, preventing crime, and solving mysteries, but glimpse underneath the surface dissimilarities and a surprising mesh occurs.

The production was impressive considering all the work needing to be done by director Katie Taylor, at the helm of a scrappy young company like OTO. The score was arranged by musical director Erica Melton, and consisted of two ensembles: an orchestra with piano, harp, clarinets and brass (provided by Festival Brass), and in lieu of strings (and some of the winds) was a small army of electric guitars (the Electric Opera Company) and percussionists off to the right of the stage, in addition to live foley artists.

Baritone Michael Miersma had the leading role as Larry 'Loomin' Large (Alberich the Dwarf,) who determines that the only way to gain the glory and power that rightfully belongs to him is to come into possession of the perfect tan, which stood in for the Ring. He was great fun to watch; he brought with him the boldness and brash confidence that have marked his past roles, qualities that served this farce well because anything less than over-the-top would not have been enough. His madman histrionics, communicated through strong facial acting, were beyond the pale, absolutely hysterical.

The singing as a whole was remarkably well-done; Benjamin Bell's Wotan (Mitch (David Hasselhoff)), David Simmons' Matt Brody (Loge) and Emily Kinkley as Freia (CJ Parker (Pamela Anderson)) all acquitted themselves admirably from a vocal standpoint in these demanding roles, as did the chorus and those singing supporting roles.

The dialogue was ridiculous, much like the TV show. Sample:

'You're making fun of me!'
'No duh.'
'I'm going to barf.'




I can't say I'm familiar enough with Baywatch to know whether that was lifted directly from the script, but it makes its point. In all it was a riot, the Baywatch theme serving as a clever vehicle with which to roast the self-importance of Wagnerian opera. The orchestral reduction was sensitively done; surprisingly it felt like there wasn't much missing from a harmonic or textural standpoint. The fuzzy, wailing, Baywatch theme that kept recurring from the electric guitars, as well as the quotation of MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This' are more examples of the cornball antics that Taylor fearlessly employed.

The production runs through February 28th at the Clinton Street Theater, and is preceded by Leitmotif Bingo 30 minutes before the beginning of each show. Scaled back quite a bit from the lengthy original, it's another example of Portland's avant-garde, alternative classical music scene, and perhaps the only thing in the world that could bring hardcore Baywatch and Wagner fans together--at long last.

Today's Birthdays

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

and

Russel Crouse (1893-1966)
Louis Kahn (1901-1974)
Richard Matheson (1926)

Pianist Susan Chan to give concert with London-based violinist Madeleine Mitchell

Pianist and PSU professor Susan Chan will give a free concert with London-based violinist Madeleine Mitchell at Sherman Clay/Moes Piano tomorrow (Saturday, February 20th) at 3 pm. The concert is part of PSU's Music Department Faculty series, and the program features works by Mozart, Brahms, Bridge, and pieces written for Mitchell by MacMillan and Nyman.

Sherman Clay/Moes Pianos is located in the Pear District at 131 Northwest 13th Avenue. (Portland).

Here's some extra information about Madeleine Mitchell:

Madeleine Mitchell is one of Britain's liveliest musical forces and foremost violinists' (The Times). She has performed in over 40 countries as a soloist in a wide repertoire in major venues. Fulbright/ITT Fellow to New York in the 1980s, she toured Texas and New Mexico in 2009 and has been invited back for concerts and master classes in Florida, California and Portland in 2010. Mitchell has been nominated for Woman of the Year, the European Women of Achievement and the Creative Briton Awards.

Preview of this weekend's Vancouver Symphony (WA) concert

I have written a preview of the up-coming Vancouver Symphony concert, and it's in today's issue of The Columbian newspaper. The concert will feature Glière's Harp Concerto with guest artist Catherine Barrett. "Elegy" by composer Joel Feigin (who teaches at the University of California Santa Barbara), and Vasily Kalinnikov’s “Symphony No. 1.”

Today's Birthdays

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

and

Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
Amy Tan (1952)
Siri Hustvedt (1955)

Today's Birthdays

Pietro Giovanni Guarneri (1655-1720)
Marchel Landowski (1915-1999)
Rolande Falcinelli (1920-2006)
Rita Gorr (1926)
Yoko Ono (1933)
Marek Janowski (1939)
Marlos Nobre (1939)
Donald Crockett (1951)

and

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)
Toni Morrison (1931)

James DePreist leads Phoenix Symhony in recent concert

James DePreist, former music director of the Oregon Symphony, conducted the Phoenix Symphony February 4-6 and received a rave review from Richard Nilsen in The Arizona Republic. On Saturday evening (February 20th) DePreist will lead the Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in the following program:

DANIEL BÖRTZ Sinfonia No. 1
PROKOFIEV Piano Concerto No. 5 in G Major
R. STRAUSS Ein Heldenleben

Today's Birthdays

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
Sr. Edward German (1862-1936)
Andres Segovia (1893-1987)
Marian Anderson (1893-1993)
Ron Goodwin (1925-2003)
Fredrich Cerha (1926)
Lee Hoiby (1926)
Anner Bylsma (1944)
Karl Jenkins (1944)

and

Ronald Knox (1888-1957)
Jack Gilbert (1925)
Chaim Potok (1929-2002)

Imani Winds at Mississippi Studios with Robert McBride

This Thursday you can catch some thing special, because the Imani Winds, one of American's premiere wind ensembles, will do a live-recording with Robert McBride, aka Mr. Club Mod at Mississippi Studies (3939 N. Mississippi, Portland) at 8 pm. The ensemble will play music that has been written for them by jazz greats Paquito D'Rivera, Jason Moran and Wayne Shorter, hot off their latest CD.

Tickets are $15.

Today's Birthdays

Willem Kes (1856-1934)
Selim Palmgren (1878-1951)
Maria Korchinska (1895-1979)
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)