MUS I C
BY BRETT CAMP B ELL
BROOKS ROBER TSON
NOW
HIRING
Santa Fe Natural Tobacco
Company is looking for a
Senior Manager of Community
& Consumer Engagement.
SYMPHONIC LOVE DUETS
Porgy and Bess to Miles Davis
O
n Nov. 23, the Eugene Symphony transforms an opera into a concert and a ballet
into a play. The inventive show opens with Sergei Prokofiev’s intensely dramatic
1936 ballet score, Romeo and Juliet — but instead of dancers, the Silva Hall stage
will boast a trio of actors from Ashland’s world-renowned Oregon Shakespeare
Festival who will perform scenes from Shakespeare’s play, sometimes interpolated,
sometimes in conjunction with the music. It’s a treat to see two important Oregon arts
institutions working together and I hope this performance, part of the symphony’s
Counterpoint Festival, heralds future collaborations. The rest of the concert is equally
appealing: merely music from the greatest American opera (and maybe the word “American”
is even unnecessary), George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. While this concert version,
featuring a quintet of vocal soloists and the Eugene Symphony Chorus, isn’t a substitute for
an actual staged version of Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s gripping drama, any
opportunity to hear some of the finest music ever written by an American composer is a must.
Nov. 22 at Central Lutheran Church, another concert in the Counterpoint Festival
explores similar themes (love and fate), when the vocal ensemble Vox Resonat sings
several 15th- and 16th-century settings (by composers including Josquin des Prez and
Nicolas Gombert) of the myth of Dido and Aeneas, which has produced much great music.
Speaking of great American composers, one of them was actually born in Oregon. Lou
Harrison moved with his family to California as a child, and then garnered fame in New York
before returning West in the 1950s. He went on to became one of the pioneers of the happy
hybrids of Western and Eastern sounds that we now take for granted in “world music.” On
Sunday, Dec. 1, the acclaimed young Voxare String Quartet will perform Harrison’s
1979 String Quartet Set as part of the ChamberMusic@Beall series at the UO Beall Concert
Hall. “The quartet set is a real clear example of how Harrison brought wonderful new
influences — Medieval and Turkish — into his work and American music,” says David
Harrington of the Kronos Quartet, which first recorded it. The concert also features another of
the 20th century’s finest quartets by another composer known for embracing “ethnic” influences,
Bela Bartok’s String Quartet No. 4 and Mendelssohn’s String Quarter No. 2 in A minor.
Another great early Romantic A-minor string quartet, by Franz Schubert, tops the bill
at the Oregon Bach Collegium’s all-Schubert concert on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 24, at
United Lutheran Church. Soprano Heather Holmquest and fortepianist Margret Gries
will play some of the composer’s songs, and Ralph-Stricker Chapman will play his
lilting Arpeggione sonata.
Back at the UO, the school’s Collegium Musicum plays more Baroque music (featuring
improvisation, which Baroque musicians were doing centuries before jazz) by Handel,
Barbara Strozzi and more in a free concert on Dec. 3 at the campus’s intimate Collier House.
And you can hear electronic music by guest composer Carla Scaletti (who’s writing a piece
based on data from Switzerland’s Large Hardon Collider) on Nov. 23 at Thelma Schnitzer
Hall, and the Oregon Percussion Ensemble performs at Beall on Nov. 26.
Speaking of improvisation, some of America’s finest happened in Miles Davis’s two
legendary quintets — one with John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers and Red
Garland in the mid 1950s, and the other with Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock and Wayne
Shorter in the 1960s. Between those two pinnacles, his 1961 group featuring saxophonist
Hank Mobley, Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly (who also played on Davis’
magnificent Kind of Blue) is sometimes overlooked. Nov. 21 at The Shedd, the Carl Woideck
Jazz Heritage Project revisits Davis’ classic music from that ensemble’s The Complete
Blackhawk live recording. And the following evening, The Shedd hosts another kind of
partly improvised music, the fingerstyle guitar-picking duo of Brooks Robertson and John
Standefer, who play music that ranges from jazz to bluegrass to country and beyond. ■
★
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eugeneweekly.com • November 21, 2013
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