Wine and chamber music
WVCMF pairs vineyards and commemorative local wines with contemporary and classical composers for their "Inventing America" season.
Originally Published in Oregon ArtsWatch August 2026
Toward the end of July, a few weeks before the opening of the 11th season of Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival, founders Sasha Callahan and Leo Eguchi were blind-tasting pinot noirs at J. Christopher Wines in the Chehalem Mountains near Newberg, Ore. The winery is now owned by Ernst Loosen of Appassionata Estate, and Loosen loves and produces pinot noirs – so of course, the wine they were seeking to celebrate the festival’s composer-in-residence, Lei Liang, would highlight that decidedly Oregon grape.
During this pleasant mid-summer ritual, the two musicians, who now live in Boston (Callahan grew up in Portland with sister, Portland arts leader Eve Callahan, who helped originate and sustain the festival) were comparing vintages with J.Christopher/Appassionata Estate winemaker Tim Malone to uncover a commemorative wine for Chinese-American Lei Liang, whose music will be featured for the three-weekend event Aug 8-9, Aug.15-16 and Aug. 22-23.
“Lei Liang has a beautiful talent of asking the listener to explore richness and beauty that might be lying just beneath the surface of the natural world,” said Eguchi, an enophile as well as cellist. After blind-tasting a 2023 La Colina Vineyard Pinot Noir, Eguchi wrote in his notes, “How could such an arrestingly pale-colored wine belie such sophisticated depth and intensity of flavors? Juicy fruit notes of cherry, raspberry, and pomegranate swirl and dance with grapefruit pith, coriander, earth, and a hint of angostura bitters. Dashed are expectations that a wine with this little color might be thin and simple; instead we find incredible richness, length and profound beauty … if we are willing to look.”
The result was the J. Christopher Six Seasons Special Commemorative Bottling, 2023 Pinot Noir, La Colina Vineyard named for Lei Liang’s Six Seasons, which will be performed during the festival’s first weekend at 5:30 pm Aug. 8 and 9 in J. Christopher Wines‘ pleasantly chilly cellar. Concert musicians include violinists Callahan and Megumi Stohs Lewis, violist Wendy Richman and cellist Eguchi.
Earlier in the concert, for Reena Esmail’s This Is It (Part 3), Eguchi found a suitable sauvignon blanc to “match” the music: the Appassionata 2023 Uber Sauvignon. “We love the way this wine pairs with Esmail’s contrasting and richly colorful miniatures by showing a kaleidoscope of lemongrass, citrus peel, toasted coconut, gooseberry and grapefruit. This sauvignon blanc – perhaps the greatest in the Pacific Northwest – also has a fascinating texture with an incredibly long citrusy finish, unfolding slowly like a slowly unfolding tune carried across the wide windswept expanses evoked in Lei Liang’s Gobi Gloria,” a final piece in the concert.
Sipping first-rate Oregon wines while listening to chamber music is the art and soul of this festival. Three glasses of wine poured before and during the weekend concerts come with admission.
Three concerts, three weekends, three wines
Concerts will take place at three different wineries – J. Christopher at Appassionata Estate, Archery Summit and Sokol Blosser Winery, each about an hour from Portland via car – with three different musical programs. The music is accompanied by three glasses of wine from each winery. Don’t worry about the heat or the glare from the setting sun: barrel rooms and indoor spaces will be the stages for the chamber musicians. With the theme “Inventing America” as America celebrates its 250th birthday of innovation, rebellion, individuality and freedom, Callahan and Eguchi have designed three concerts to include music from such familiar favorites as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Antonin Dvořák, along with such contemporary composers as Lei Liang, Jessie
Montgomery, Reena Esmail and Iranian-American Kian Ravaei, whose stars have risen or are on the rise.
The weekend of Aug. 15-16, in Archery Summit’s barrel room, look forward to Lei Liang’s new interpretation, for contemporary string quartet, of Claudio Monteverdi’s 17th-century madrigal Lamento della Ninfa. Lei Liang’s piece will be featured with Mozart’s “Dissonance” quartet and former WVCMF two-time composer-in-residence Jessie Montgomery’s Source Code, a single movement piece with a structure reflecting African-American spirituals. Finally, the West Coast premiere of Ravaei’s wildly original Neverland is on the program. Ravaei, 26, has appeared at Chamber Music Northwest’s summer festival in Portland for several seasons.
The 2023 Archery Summit, Summit Vineyard Pinot Noir made the cut for a matching wine during the second weekend, Eguchi said:
“Studies of gestures, rhythm, and syntax from iconic Civil Rights-era artists such as Alvin Ailey, Langston Hughes and Ella Fitzgerald pointed composer Jessie Montgomery toward Black spirituals as the ‘source code’ underlying so much of what expresses our country’s greatness. Kian Ravaei’s imagined Neverlands odyssey sees the self in strange lands, only to return home and rediscover the soulful center. These pieces require a wine of depth, with a confident sense of place, and the energy to keep moving forward. Archery Summit’s ‘Summit’ vineyard, the heart of its operation, is just that. With complex notes of red cherry, rhubarb, tart Italian plums, black tea, gypsum and lilacs on full display, this is a wine of beauty, poise and drive that has become iconic in its own right.”
Musicians joining Egushi and Callahan for the second and third weekends will be violist Charles Noble and violinist Greg Ewer.
The final weekend, Aug. 22 -23 at Sokol Blosser Winery in Dayton, Ore., will spotlight Indigenous traditions. Pieces include: Czech composer Dvořák’s American quartet, written in 1893 in Spillville, Iowa, when he was trying to decode American music, including that of Black and Indigenous communities; Tuscarora/Taino singer/songwriter Pura Fe’s traditional Rattle Songs, originally on the 1997 album with her a cappella group Ulali, and later orchestrated for string quartet by Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate; and Lei Liang’s Song Recollection, built around the traditional vocal music of a Taiwanese aboriginal tribe, will conclude the program.
The sounds of a different landscape
On his flight back to San Diego from China this summer, the 2026 Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival composer-in-residence Lei Liang answered a number of questions via email.
The 53-year-old is the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Music at University of California, San Diego, where he teaches composition and leads research in music, science and technology through his Lei Lab. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for Xiaoxiang, a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra. Here is Lei Liang’s note about that piece that illustrates one of his composing approaches to his sonic world:
“Xiaoxiang refers to the region in Hunan Province in China where the rivers Xiao and Xiang intersect. A tragic event took place in that region during the Chinese Cultural Revolution: a woman’s husband was killed by a local official. Without the means to seek justice, she decided to take revenge on the official by wailing like a ghost in the forest behind the official’s residence every evening. Months later, both the official and herself went insane. I composed Memories of Xiaoxiang (for alto saxophone and electronics, 2003) to commemorate this story through the use of electronically transformed sounds. The concerto re-synthesizes the electronic sounds through the means of an orchestra. Instead of displaying technical virtuosity, the soloist in this piece portrays the protagonist’s inability to articulate or utter. The soloist’s music is marked by silences. In that sense, the work may be perceived as an anti-concerto.”
He has won numerous prizes including the Grawemeyer Award. Critics have called his music haunting, utterly original, and full of sonic paintings that draw on hidden landscapes and below-the-surface natural sounds. Five of his pieces will be featured at the festival during its three weekends from Aug. 8-23. The festival will be his first time in Oregon, and besides tasting his commemorative pinot noir produced by J. Christopher and spending time with musicians and audiences, he said he is “especially looking forward to enjoying Oregon’s beautiful landscapes, and simply having time to listen to the sounds of a different landscape.”
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and flow.
Oregon ArtsWatch: When and how did you fall in love with music? Is it true you wrote your first pieces at the age of 6 and that some are used as teaching tools for children?
Lei Liang: I grew up surrounded by music and began studying it at the age of 4. I started composing when I was 6, simply because I was curious about creating sounds of my own. Some of those early piano pieces are still used today by teachers with young students, which is something that brings me a great deal of joy.
OAW: Do you play an instrument? I assume piano.
LL: Yes, piano was my first instrument and remains an important part of my musical life. But over the years, I’ve become equally fascinated by the “instruments” of the natural world — birdsong, whales, ice, and even minerals — which have greatly expanded the way I think about music.
