MUSIC
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
MARIMBIST ERIKO
DAIMO PERFORMS
AT BEALL HALL
VIBRANT VISITORS
February basks in music from Brian Blade to The Bombadils to Bach
T
hanks primarily to a pair of forward-looking
institutions, Eugene keeps attracting visiting
vanguard artists that just about any other midsized
mini-metropolis would envy. This month, one of
them snags three young stars who are also
appearing at the big Portland Jazz Festival that annually
brings some of world’s finest improvisers to the Northwest.
On Feb. 19, The Shedd brings back one of jazz’s greatest
drummers, Brian Blade, and his mighty Fellowship
Band. Emerging from New Orleans’ jazz scene in the
1980s, Blade has been a first call drummer with many of
jazz’s greatest players, and a mainstay of Wayne Shorter’s
superb quartet since 2000.
Classical and jazz fans alike should flock to The Shedd
Feb. 22 when a familiar name to Eugeneans, Dan Tepfer,
returns to the town where he spent many childhood
summers. Now one of jazz’s rising young pianists and
composers, with DownBeat awards, competition prizes,
rave-reviewed albums with jazz legend Lee Konitz and
others, the New York-based Tepfer earned deserved
acclaim for the music he’ll play here: his fabulous, jazzy
solo piano improvisations on J.S. Bach’s monumental
“Goldberg Variations.”
Our other major music beacon, the University of
Oregon, attracts even more than its usual quota of
fascinating musicians this month. Along with Imani
Winds’ appearance (see “Inherit the Winds”), New York-
based cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, who just left the Kronos
Quartet after a long and fruitful run, caps his weeklong
residency with a Beall Concert Hall recital Friday, Feb. 21,
co-starring UO faculty musicians and featuring music by
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Bang on a Can
founder David Lang, a premiere by Jesse Jones and works
for cello and electronics.
Zeigler and Beall’s Feb. 22 stars, Fireworks Ensemble,
also have Portland gigs coming up, which no doubt helped
make the journey here feasible, but for the founder of the
electric chamber ensemble (which plays everything from
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to Frank Zappa, Charles Ives,
Bill Monroe, Aaron Copland, the UO’s own Robert Kyr
and much more), it’s also a homecoming, as bassist Brian
Coughlin started the group in New York not long after
graduating from the UO in 2000.
On Monday, Feb. 24, still another acclaimed young
visitor, award-winning Japanese marimbist Eriko Daimo,
gives a percussion recital at Beall Hall.
Tuesday, Feb. 18, Scottish fiddle master Brandon
Vance plays traditional Irish and Scottish music with
guirarist Glen Waddell from Eugene’s own late, lamented
Skye and the UO’s Eliot Grasso on the haunting uilleann
pipes.
More Celtic sounds sing out on Tuesday, Feb. 25, when
Quebec’s The Bombadils play Irish, bluegrass and
Quebecois music at a much smaller Eugene institution, the
intimate Broadway House concerts at 911 W. Broadway
that have grown from hosting UO student performances to
also occasionally booking cool road shows.
Three of our homegrown classical institutions next
week offer the best programs of their respective seasons.
On Saturday, Beall hosts the Oregon Mozart Players in
one of their namesake’s greatest symphonies (No. 39),
loveliest concertos (the sublime Clarinet Concerto,
featuring Eugene’s own master Michael Anderson) and
Stravinsky’s update on one of Bach’s Brandenburgs, his
Jeffrey Zeigler| Cello
©JILL STEINBERG
1937 “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto.
Thursday, Feb. 20, at the Hult Center, the Eugene
Symphony plays another Stravinsky masterpiece, the
ballet score that jump-started 20th-century music: Igor
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which can be the most
exciting music you’ll ever hear in an orchestra hall, as so
many orchestras proved last year in the many performances
in its centennial year. The scintillating program also
includes the other candidate for progenitor of modern
music: Debussy’s sultry Prelude to The Afternoon of a
Faun, and Sergei Prokofiev’s thrilling Violin Concerto No.
2 featuring another young star, Fumiaki Miura.
And on Sunday, Feb. 23, at United Lutheran Church,
the Oregon Bach Collegium plays Baroque violinist
Michael Sand’s transformations of three great works by
J.S. Bach (Viola da Gamba, Sonata in G minor, Concerto
for Three Violins and the famous Italian Concerto) into
arrangements for other Baroque instruments — something
Bach himself did often, making old music new again. ■
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eugeneweekly.com • February 13, 2014
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