Press

On March 1 Vijay Gupta, violinist and artistic director of Street Symphony, joined 45^th Parallel Universe for a performance at Polaris Hall. I may have said 45^th Parallel Universe, but it would be better to say this was an F.O.G. production – that’s Friends of Greg, meaning Greg Ewer, 45^th Parallel co-founder and one of the great violinists within Portland’s chamber music scene.

With great music and visuals and a fantastic performance, a warehouse concert creates an artistic evocation of vast geological disruptions and troubling environmental times.

About halfway through a delightful interview with Oregon musician and entrepreneur Lisa Lipton, after hearing mention of “the bar” a few times, the present author had to swallow his pride and ask, ahem, sorry to interrupt, Lisa, but which bar? She took a beat before explaining, rather patiently (for it is a journalist’s job to already know these things), “I own Mendelssohn’s on North Mississippi.”

January 26 brought New Yorker music critic Alex Ross to The Reser near downtown Beaverton. Hosted by 45^th Parallel Universe, the show featured readings from his extensive collection of writings as the leading music critic in The New Yorker and author of three books. These passages introduced a great collection of pieces by Ligeti, Luther Adams, Price, Radiohead, Wagner and Copland.

On December 19, 45^th Parallel Universe put on a four-venue Pub Crawl along Mississippi Avenue in North Portland. Clarinetist, Mendelssohn’s owner, and one-who-does-a-bit-of-everything-music-related Lisa Lipton organized the event, and mere hours later a press release went out announcing her as the new Executive Director for 45^th Parallel.

One of today’s hottest contemporary classical composers isn’t really contemporary — or even alive. Though he was originally acclaimed as one of the leading second-gen minimalist composers and new music performers, when Julius Eastman died alone, not yet 50, in 1990, he was homeless, mentally ill, evicted from his New York apartment, bereft of possessions — including his many original musical scores, many of which took decades of painstaking work by musicians and scholars to reconstruct.

45^th Parallel Universe founder and virtuoso violinist Greg Ewer is bringing a gaggle of early music specialists and their historical instruments to The Old Madeleine Church in Northeast Portland for an evening of Baroque music by Composers Besides Bach: a bit of Handel and Vivaldi, plus music by Anna Bon, Jean-Pierre Guignon, Antonio Caldera, and Jean-Marie Leclair.

ArtsWatch’s series “Catching Up With” asks the long-running local music groups: how the hell have you been doing? …how have you gotten through the last Year of Weirdness? …and what’s next? For our second installment we spoke to three furloughed Oregon Symphony musicians who over the last year put on live-streamed concerts nearly every week.