I love this time of year.

For a sports nut like me, this is heaven: the World Series is around the corner, football season is in full swing, and hope springs eternal for the latest version of the Trail Blazers. Yes, I’m that kind of sports fanatic!

And more importantly, live music returns!

Autumn also has this way of setting the perfect mood for classical music. The cozy indoor settings we choose create an intimate connection between the audience and the performers. It's like inviting our listeners into a warm, musical embrace, while outside, nature does its thing, enchanting us with those beautiful leaves.

Our return to the concert hall begins October 13th with Out of the Dark, featuring music by three brilliant composers. We hope to see you there!

Ron Blessinger

Out of the Dark
October 13th, 2023, 7:00 PM
The Old Madeleine Church
3123 NE 24th Ave, Portland, OR, 97212
Free Friend Friday! Buy a ticket, bring a friend for free…

45^th Parallel founder Greg Ewer previews Last Round by Osvaldo Golijov

Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round is one of a very special breed of classical pieces that has the power to routinely stop first-time listeners in their tracks. Compositions like Caroline Shaw’s Partita for 8 Voices, Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel, and Bach’s famous Chaconne for solo violin are, in my opinion, also in this category. My first hearing of Last Round left me completely taken with its harmonic and rhythmic language, and absolutely gobsmacked by its raw energy. 

The piece is inspired by the sudden death of the great Argentinian Tango composer Astor Piazzolla, who in Golijov’s own words, “left us... without saying goodbye," felled by stroke in 1992 at the peak of his creativity. Golijov continues in his composer’s notes, “That day the musical face of Buenos Aires was abruptly frozen. The creation of that face had started a hundred years earlier from the unlikely combination of African Rhythms underlying gauchos’ couplets, sung in the style of Sicilian canzonettas over an accompanying Andalucian guitar.”

“The title is borrowed from a short story on boxing by Julio Cortazar, the metaphor for an imaginary chance for Piazzolla’s spirit to fight one more time (he used to get into fistfights throughout his life). The piece is conceived as an idealized bandoneon. The first movement represents the act of violent compression of the instrument and the second a final, seemingly endless opening sigh... but Last Round is also a sublimated tango dance. Two quartets confront each other... The bows fly in the air as inverted legs in crisscrossed choreography, always attracting and repelling each other, always in danger of clashing, always avoiding it with the immutability that can only be acquired by transforming hot passion into pure pattern.”

For Eleanor Alberga’s Succubus Moon, oboist Karen Wagner describes her passion for performing with strings

I love playing in orchestra because I love playing with and being surrounded by strings. So, any chance I have to play chamber music with my string pals, count me in. Oboists have a couple of staple chamber music pieces with strings that we generally have at the ready – the Mozart Oboe Quartet and the Britten Phantasy Quartet. Both are brilliant and delightful to play and to listen to. However, both have been played… a lot. And I have played them both… a lot. Of course there are others, but I recently became aware of a newer work for oboe and string quartet called Succubus Moon by Jamaican-born British composer Eleanor Alberga. I immediately listened to the only recording I could find and was spellbound. So many colors and sonorities. Of course some super tricky technical things to learn and lots of compound rhythms to put together. It has been really fun learning Succubus Moon and I am really looking forward to performing it for everyone. 

Fun fact! If Eleanor Alberga’s name sounds familiar to you, it might be that you heard Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra perform her piece Arise Athena last summer??!!

Kenneth Fuchs on how his composition Out of the Dark draws inspiration from the profound and evocative paintings of Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler’s work has made a significant impact on my creative life. I was first introduced to it in the fall of 1983, an impressionable graduate student at Juilliard at the time and was bowled over by the beauty of Helen’s painting and her free-wheeling creative attitude. This encounter helped me eventually to find my own creative path and surmount the doctrinaire rhetoric of avant-garde musical composition that prevailed in the 1980s. The aesthetic move toward the “new Romanticism” in musical composition was in its nascent stages, and it would be another decade before it was embraced in a significant way by a large group of composers.

I wrote Helen a letter shortly after I saw the documentary, telling her why I liked her work, and she wrote back immediately. Helen and I became friends and we maintained a correspondence over the years until her death in December 2011.