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

EUGENE, Ore — I love Eric Whitacre’s music. I imagine that many fans of choral music agree with me. His work is lyrical and harmonious, poetic and optimistic. It’s approachable. Read More

EUGENE, ORE. —A surprise Bach fugue popped up in the middle of the Oregon Bach Festival’s serious symphonic organ program on July 11. Unscripted, amid a sophisticated night of two world premieres, Bach Fugue in A Minor, BWV 543 sent the audience soaring into Bach-adoration. Read More

MOUNT ANGEL, Ore. — The last decade has not been altogether harmonious for the Oregon Bach Festival. Aside from Covid interruptions, a seven-year interlude without artistic leadership has dogged the event. Read More

Mel Bochner, who is 84 and recovering on the East Coast from a prolonged battle with Covid and brain surgery, reflected on a print called Liar in the current Portland show, Mel Bochner: Words Mean Everything. Read More

If you caught one of the four performances of The Merry Widow in late April at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall, you got a taste of a full-blown semi-professional opera company. These productions are engineered and performed by mostly undergraduate students? Well yes, but under some very good direction. Read More