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

Birds and soaring songs flew by during Resonance Ensemble’s powerful concert March 17 at Alberta Rose Theatre. No surprise the company of well-balanced voices (there were 19 for this performance), founded by visionary choral director Katherine FitzGibbon, has stuck around for 15 years. Once again, Resonance let us in on poetic, socially conscious music, this time by Black contemporary composers, that inspires us to fly a bit higher. Read More

Whimsical, warm, winsome.

The Snowy Day, Portland Opera’s one-act hour-long spring piece, playing through March 24 at the Newmark Theatre, is built on the beguiling 1962 children’s picture book by Ezra Jack Keats. The book–more than the opera, which was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera and premiered there in 2021–was a game-changer. It was the first children’s book from a major publisher (Viking Press) to feature a Black child, and the first prestigious Caldecott Medal-winner (1963) to tell a Black kid’s story. That was some six decades ago, and many people, including former First Lady Michelle Obama and Native American best-selling author Sherman Alexie, consider it one of the first books they loved. Today, you can’t find it at the library. It is usually checked out. Read More

SEATTLE — It’s about time that Seattle Opera got in on staging a Black-composed opera with its current co-production of X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.

Black operas have stormed the stages in the past several years with riveting productions, a sea change in programming. Count among them Blue, The Central Park Five, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Omar and Champion, several of which we’ve seen in the Northwest. The operas have been compelling and deeply shocking, showing slices of life and pockets of terror that most of us, if we are white, never experience. Read More