music
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
Classical Stuffers
Homegrown symphonic gifts for music lovers
T
his has been the strongest year in memory for
Oregon classical music recordings. Any of these
CD would make an excellent buy-local stocking
stuffer for Oregon music lovers.
Portland Baroque
Orchestra:
St. John Passion
Until
recently,
performances of Bach’s two
surviving musical retellings
of Jesus’s death often used
bloated
orchestras,
choruses, and industrial
strength modern instruments
and tunings that violated
what scholars believe to be the composer’s intentions,
rendering it an impenetrable, oversized musical monument
rather than an intimate musical drama. Bach’s score
doesn’t specify how many singers and players to use, but
long-time PBO music director and veteran English early
music violinist Monica Huggett has found that a small
chorus and orchestra make the porridge taste just right.
Abetted by the magnificent Portland chorus Cappella
Romana and uniformly superb soloists from Canada’s Le
Voix Baroque, PBO’s bracing, crisp, urgent and
emotionally searing recording is the finest I’ve heard. It
makes PBO’s recent partnership with the Oregon Bach
Festival all the more welcome.
Martingale Ensemble:
Mahler: Symphony #4
A chamber orchestra
version of a symphony by
classical music’s mega-
orchestrator may seem as
appealing — and as
oxymoronic — as fat-free
cheese. Yet slim instrumental
textures often reveal musical
nuances obscured by a
plethora of instruments. This 1921 reduction of Mahler’s
1901 original, arranged for a series of concerts facilitated by
composer Arnold Schoenberg, makes an appropriate vehicle
for this nature-worshiping composer’s symphonic statement.
The 12-member ensemble (featuring some of Portland’s
finest musicians, including members of the Oregon
Symphony) affords greater transparency for the
symphony’s musical textures and evokes its essential
atmosphere. Same goes for the other work on the disk, a
1920 arrangement of Claude Debussy’s beguilingly
impressionistic, gently revolutionary Prelude to the
Afternoon of a Faun.
Oregon Symphony:
Music for a Time of War
The orchestra’s first
album with eighth year
music director Carlos
Kalmar repeats last May’s
Carnegie Hall program that
garnered accolades from
The New York Times and
New Yorker critic Alex
Ross.
Although only John
Adams’s somber setting of Walt Whitman’s The Wound
Dresser (featuring the always-imposing singer Sanford
Sylvan) specifically makes martial allusions, the ferocious,
ominous mood of rarely heard works by Benjamin Britten
(Sinfonia da Requiem) and Ralph Vaughan Williams
(Symphony #4), plus Charles Ives’s opening American
classic, The Unanswered Question, evokes the violence
and anguish of our own era’s conflicts. Like the Carnegie
triumph, this CD’s blistering, committed, sharply etched
performances should show the rest of the world just how
far the orchestra has raised its game since Kalmar’s
arrival. This is certainly one of the year’s most compelling
classical recordings.
Oregon Guitar Quartet:
Something Wondrous
Fair; Realizations
This fab foursome of
award-winning Northwest
classical solo fretboard
masters — award-winning
composer Bryan Johanson,
fellow Portland State
University profs David
Franzen and Jesse McCann,
as well as Portland Community College prof John Mery
— released two splendid albums in the past year.
Wondrous Fair, comprising Johanson’s ingenious
original arrangements of American folk music from blues
to ballads to fiddle tunes to Thelonious Monk’s jazz
classic, “Well, You Needn’t,” lives up to its title.
Realizations sets Baroque classics by Bach, Haydn,
Vivaldi, Scarlatti and Piccini in arrangements that demonstrate
how, in the hands of players like these, a seemingly
monochromatic ensemble can almost serve as a little chamber
orchestra, adept at elucidating Baroque counterpoint and
providing new insights into 18th-century masterworks.
Vagabond Opera:
Sing for Your Lives
The Portland-based self-
described Balkan Arabic
Klezmer-based
original
absurdist cabaret ensemble’s
most cohesive recorded
work to date maintains its
hallmark variety. But this
time, the many elements
feel fully assimilated rather than occasionally derivative,
maybe because they’re all originals written by the band
members, including VO founder/leader and erstwhile
opera singer Eric Stern and cellist/chanteuse Ashia
Grzesik, a one-time Cirque du Soleil musician who
maintains a flourishing solo career. You won’t hear more
fun in a classically oriented album this year.
ew
the
e
Cappella Romana:
Mt. Sinai: Frontier of
Byzantium
In its own concerts, this
Portland-based
chorus
specializes in the gripping,
austere music from the
Byzantine empire. The
group’s two decades of
experience, its stentorian
performance and the expertise
of its London-based director, Portland-born Alexander Lingas,
make this a definitive recording of haunting ancient vocal
sounds. Drawn from medieval manuscripts preserved in a
Greek Orthodox monastery at Mt. Sinai, the chant-like melody
and mesmerizing vocal drones never grow tiresome on this
splendid recording — a recording that wisely preserves the
cathedral echo and resonance listeners would hear live, now or
a millennium ago.
CAT / Eugene Bicycle Works
Donate your unused bike(s)
and parts for a ta
tax deduction
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before the year is up!
455 W. 1st Ave, Eugene OR 97401
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www.catoregon.org
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DECEMBER 22, 2011 29