Chamber Music Northwest’s New@Night concerts at the Pearl District’s Armory allow musicians to show us their edgier sides and their edgier works. Forget black tie, just settle in and relax – though you will be challenged by the music at these very informal events. Read More

SEATTLE — “Bound” is a multi-layered word that can go in boundless directions: bound to tradition, bound to the law, bound to the past, bound to duty, bound to family, bound to conflicting values.

The one-act, 60-minute opera Bound, playing through June 18 (I saw it June 10) at Seattle Opera’s intimate Tagney Jones Hall, touches on all those meanings. Read More

Karen Vuong sings the role in Bound of second-generation Vietnamese-American high school junior Diane Tran. In a bizarre and shocking twist to an immigrant story, Tran was jailed by a by-the book judge because she missed too much school. The cause? She was working two jobs when her parents abandoned their children in a suburb outside of Houston, Texas. Tran’s is a true story that surfaced in the news in 2012. Read More

When Cuban-born keyboardist Omar Sosa and Senegal’s kora virtuoso Seckou Keita come to Portland, it’s a party, it’s a blast. Not every day you hear the West African kora, an upright many-stringed harp-like instrument that takes years to master. At this concert it was center stage. Read More

On May 4, when Billy Childs and his stellar touring quartet took over the snug 1905 jazz club in NoPo’s Mississippi neighborhood for two back-to-back shows, nothing was missing–except CDs for sale. Childs’ most recent and perhaps most evocative album, Winds of Change, produced by Mack Records and released in late March, was sold out according to the band, so CD-seekers were out of luck. Read More

Funny–when Catalyst Quartet played April 16 at The Old Church, its touted new-music repertoire didn’t thrill the audience as much as Fanny Mendelssohn’s early 19th-century String Quartet in E-Flat Major, No. 1, Op. 22. She wrote the piece in 1834 when she was 28 years old. It languished, unpublished, until 1989. Queen Victoria loved it, though she thought Fanny’s famous brother Felix wrote it, a logical conclusion in those only-male-composer times. Read More

At first glance, she appears to be the girl next door, dimples and all. But open your ears for a minute or two, and you’ll discover that Emilie-Claire Barlow is a sophisticated Canadian jazz singer. Her soft-swinging style, which she pulls off exactingly, yet casually, in English and French is easy to listen to. Her lithe voice, clean articulation and rhythmic intelligence echo aspects of Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and Stevie Wonder, her performing role models. Read More

Who hasn’t heard Amelia Lukas’ flute magic around Portland? She plays with Fear No Music, Chamber Music Northwest, and countless other groups showcasing experimental and straight-up music.

To see and hear her on a barebones stage with her several flutes glittering on a plain black cloth as she celebrated her paternal Ukrainian heritage (and benefited Ukrainians) proved a full-on concert deal. Read More

For once, the soprano survives.

Different from many operas where the tragic and transgressive soprano dies, Thumbprint’s heroine lives. Portland Opera’s current production tells the real-life story of Mukhtar Mai (soprano Samina Aslam), the Pakistani woman who chooses life over traditionally shame-induced suicide after she is gang-raped for a supposed “honor” crime. Read More

With any world premiere, the big question arises: Will it last? Does it have legs to get around the world – or even the country?

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Seattle Opera’s world premiere that opened Feb. 25 and continues through March 11 at McCaw Hall, has a good chance of spicing up the repertoire – despite its remote cultural landscape.  Read More