BEAVERTON–Not that I’d outlaw the scruffy looks of most performing Portland jazz musicians, but a change-up is welcome when an East Coast group such as the Aaron Diehl Trio comes to town. Dressed in coats and ties, Diehl’s starched white cuffs gleaming like the piano keys, the trio performed coolly Jan. 19 in front of plush velour curtains turned deep blue by lighting at the 550-seat Reser Center in Beaverton. Read More

Chamber Music Northwest’s opening fall/winter/spring concert Oct. 5 at The Old Church didn’t present an evening of easy listening, but it elegantly illustrated why we have the music we hear these days. Or at least, some of what we listen to. Read More

So many Latin jazz vocalists populate the planet, and so few sing in Portland. But PDX Jazz mixed it up early this month, and we got lucky Oct. 1 when Mexican jazz singer Magos Herrera and Brazilian guitarist Vinicius Gomes performed for two hours at The Old Church. Read More

Yet another American wartime atrocity – the internment of Japanese people living in the United States during World War II – is given voice in Portland Opera’s world premiere, Shizue: An American Story. It opened Oct. 4 for a short run at Portland’s 200-seat Brunish Theatre. Read More

The San Francisco's Opera’s "The Handmaid’s Tale"" is important — and very dark. See Angela’s review. Photo by Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera. Read More

The Willamette Valley Chamber Music Festival flew by in three weekends with three different musical programs Aug. 3-18 at three different wineries (Appassionata Estate, Archery Summit and Sokol Blosser) near Portland. In tandem with artistic directors/musicians Sasha Callahan’s and Leo Eguchi’s creative programming, which ranged from Haydn’s Lark to Isabella Leonarda’s 400-year-old music, 28-year-old composer-in-residence Kevin Day put his exuberant stamp on the WVCMF’s eighth season. Read More

Fairytales can be terrifying. In Little Red Riding Hood, a girl visits her sick granny to find out “she’s” a wolf sitting up in bed, and one who has made a meal of her grandmother. In one version, the wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood, too. Sleeping Beauty is poisoned by an evil fairy to sleep for 100 years, and the poor Little Mermaid has her feet cut off. That was a Hans Christian Andersen tale, though not the one told by Disney. Read More

No worries that George Frideric Handel composed Acis, Galatea & Polyphemus in 1708 when he was 23 years old and soaking up Italian culture. Three centuries and more later, the 90-minute Acis proved as fresh as a spring meadow, as the romance-soaked libretto by Nicola Giuvo might have expressed, in the care of OrpheusPDX, Portland’s 3-year-old summer chamber opera company led by Christopher Mattaliano. Read More

A sonic gift dropped July 10 at Chamber Music Northwest’s concert at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. Sandbox Percussion, the 13-year-old Brooklyn, NY-based group of four gifted musicians, performed John Luther Adams’ Prophecies of Fire, a much anticipated haunting world premiere about human-caused climate change. Oregon Bach Festival shared the commission, and Sandbox played it again July 13 in Eugene, Ore. Read More

On the July 14 afternoon of Joan Tower’s world premiere, the composer let her dry-as-the-Eastern-Oregon-desert humor roll. “Well I’m still alive,” she said, greeting the audience in her unpretentious way at University of Portland’s acoustically attuned Lincoln Performance Hall. Tower is a bit more than a month shy of 86 years old, and this “Incandescence” concert, repeated July 15 at Kaul Auditorium, marked her 11th appearance at Chamber Music Northwest. Read More