MUSIC
BY B R E T T C A M P B E L L
NEVERTHELESS,
THEY PERSISTED
Women composers and musicians are
finding a bit more of the spotlight this
month in Eugene
L
ong before the #MeToo movement, the classical
music establishment had a long and inglorious
history of sexism. Even in the supposedly liberated
20th and 21st centuries, female composers faced
institutional discrimination, especially from
orchestras.
In 2016, a widely cited survey from the Baltimore
Symphony (conducted by a female musician — Eugene
Symphony’s own music director laureate Marin Alsop)
revealed that of the music performed this past season by 85
American orchestras, only a little more than 1 percent was
written by women.
Things are changing. In 2017, all three Pulitzer Prize
for Music finalists were women, several have won the
award over the years (including four of the past seven),
and names like Kaija Saariaho, Jennifer Higdon, Julia
Wolfe, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Chen Yi and many more are
regularly recognized as among the finest living composers,
regardless of gender.
As the Jan. 24 Eugene Symphony concert illustrates,
women have been writing great symphonic music for
decades — including Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz
(born in 1909), though it’s only recently that her music has
begun to be widely played outside Poland.
N ATA SH A PA R EMSK I
Fortunately for us, the symphony's music director
Francesco Lecce-Chong is a fan and opens the show with
her rollicking 1943 Overture for Symphonic Orchestra.
The rest of the concert is pretty old school. Tchaikovsky’s
grand first piano concerto, written in 1875 and revised
several times, is still one of the chestnuts of the orchestra
repertoire (as well as the subject of a hilarious Monty
Python sketch). This performance features another female
classical music star, Natasha Paremski, who impressed
Oregon Symphony audiences recently. It’s hard to find a
symphony that wouldn’t be overshadowed by its drama,
but Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s “Inextinguishable”
fourth symphony, written during World War I, comes close,
completing a program bursting with orchestral passion.
Delgani String Quartet’s opening concerts (Jan. 13 at
United Lutheran Church and Jan. 15 at Temple Beth Israel)
also look squarely backward in time, with music by the
greatest masters of string quartets from the 18th, 19th and
20th centuries. Almost all of Haydn’s 69 quartets are worth
hearing, and many remain among the finest chamber music
compositions in classical music. But his final full set, Op.
76, represents a real culmination, and the 1798 fifth quartet,
which Delgani plays here, has a slow movement to die
for — in fact, it’s nicknamed the “graveyard movement”
because it’s often played at funerals.
Speaking of final farewells, the Delganis will also play
Beethoven’s last quartet from his magnificent final set.
Completed months before his death, the 1826 Op. 135 isn’t
quite as forward looking nor as wondrously weird as the
others, but it radiates an autumnal beauty that makes it one
of the composer’s finest.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1949 fourth quartet has a bit of
contemporary relevance: It’s one of several he wrote using
Jewish folk themes inspired by the horror of the Holocaust
and in protest against resurgent Russian anti- Semitism,
something we in Eugene and America have sadly seen
ourselves in recent months. Like the other two quartets on
the program, it finds wintry beauty even in darkness.
A different kind of string music twangs out from the
McDonald Theatre Sunday, Jan. 20, courtesy of progres-
sive acoustic bluegrass band The Infamous String-
dusters. The 2017 Grammy-winning quintet busts out
of the traditional bluegrass formula with a contemporary
improvisatory exploration, pop covers (Allman Brothers,
Marvin Gaye, even Daft Punk and the Cure), and an ebul-
lient live show that shows there’s plenty of life in the old
forms yet. ■
Help our non-profit keep live JAZZ ALIVE in Eugene,
make new friends, and listen to outstanding music.
Come to our Volunteer Orientation at THE JAZZ STATION
124 West Broadway between Olive and Charnelton
WEDNESDAY ● JANUARY 16, 2019 ● 6:30—7:30P
volunteers@thejazzstation.org
eugeneweekly.com • January 10, 2019
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