MUSIC
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
ON ENSEMBLE
GOOD NEWS,
EVERYONE!
Bach, Broadway and more for local
music lovers
S
ome things just won’t wait. Only two days before
he was scheduled to conduct the Oregon Bach
Festival’s opening night concert, Matthew Halls
received urgent good news: the birth of his and his
wife Erin’s son, Henry. While Halls flew to To-
ronto to be with his family, the festival implemented its
backup plan: turning over the reins to Scott Allen Jarrett,
who runs Boston’s renowned Back Bay Chorale, choral
programs at Boston University and the OBF’s Vocal Fel-
lows program, and reportedly did a bang up job directing
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion here.
Halls is back for the festival’s final week, including this
Sunday’s Hult Center performance of one of the greatest
of 19th-century sacred choral-orchestral masterpieces,
Beethoven’s Solemn Mass (Missa Solemnis), which the
composer himself thought superior to his better-known
Ninth Symphony. With a team of soloists led by the superb
tenor Nicholas Phan plus the festival orchestra and chorus
augmented by the University of Oregon Chamber Choir, it
should fill even the capacious Silva Hall.
Another conductor, the respected Danish keyboardist
Lars Ulrik Mortensen, leads the festival’s Berwick Acad-
emy players in a more intimate concert at the University of
Oregon’s Beall Concert Hall on Thursday, July 13, when
the academy’s emerging historically informed performers
play a major work by the composer regarded in his time as
Europe’s greatest. Nope, not J.S. Bach nor even Handel,
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July 13, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
but their friend Georg Philipp Telemann, who like several
of his contemporaries wrote a couple of colorful pieces
based on the characters in Cervantes’s then century-old
immortal novel Don Quixote.
Telemann’s burlesque suite evokes the title character’s
love for Dulcinea, his attack on those contentious wind-
mills, his steed Rosinante and Sancho Panza’s donkey,
even his debt-caused thrashing and delusional dreams. The
concert also includes elegantly triumphant music from Zo-
roastre by one of the finest French baroque composers,
Jean Philippe Rameau, and more.
On Friday, July 14, the festival turns to global sounds
and rhythms with L.A.’s On Ensemble, one of the West’s
most prominent taiko ensembles. It’s a real fusion group,
embellishing its basic Japanese taiko drumming with in-
fluences (jazz, Central Asian throat-singing, hip-hop, elec-
tronica) and even instruments (trap set, koto, frame drum,
and more) from other cultures.
Any glimpse at the national headlines since last Novem-
ber is so discouraging that we could all use a little good news
right about now. And The Shedd is providing some. B.G.
DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson’s fizzy musi-
cal Good News!, which runs July 21-30, was one of the Jazz
Age’s biggest Broadway smashes, later made into a couple
of films, and revived (and revised) a couple times, most suc-
cessfully in a 1993 revival that sprinkled a few more appro-
priate Henderson hits from other shows of the era.
It’s actually perfect for Eugene, since the story is set on
a college campus and a key plot turn involves a big football
game. And it’s probably a good thing that The Shedd is for
once using that more recent production rather than going
back to the original, whose key plot point took a rosy view
of what the NCAA would now call a major rules infraction
— grade padding that cost some big-name schools (that is,
those that got caught) scholarships and other sports-related
penalties.
Set in the Roaring ’20s, the lightweight plot includes a
romance between a football coach and an astronomy prof,
another between a football star and a nerdy student, soror-
ity girls and varsity dances and jazzy dance numbers and a
few standout songs whose titles (“The Best Things in Life
Are Free,” “Lucky in Love,” “Just Imagine,” “You’re the
Cream in My Coffee,” “Life is a Bowl of Cherries”) give
a sense of the musical’s upbeat, pre-Depression sensibil-
ity. Ron Daum directs The Shedd’s production, with music
directed by Robert Ashens, choreography by Caitlin Chris-
topher, and a cast of veteran Shedd players.
If you didn’t get your fill of outdoor fun at Country Fair,
check out the Eugene Symphony’s free alfresco shows,
featuring classical bonbons by Tchaikovsky, Copland, Ber-
nstein, John Williams, Sousa, Brahms and more. Tickets
for the July 22 Cuthbert Amphitheater show are already
gone, but check the Hult Center ticket office close to that
date to see if any have been returned, or just head over to
the performances at Cottage Grove’s Bohemia Park on the
24th or Roseburg’s Stewart Park on the 25th, no tickets
required. ■