Press

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.

It’s such a weird thrill going to Oregon Symphony concerts, looking down into the string section with its fifty-odd neatly seated performers, and seeing 45^th Parallel Universe Executive Director Ron Blessinger, buried in the violins, attentively warming up his bow with the rest of the office.

Black Angels… a monstrosity of deconstructed chants and songs and drones and noises and large helpings of frankly gorgeous music, all of it performed, on this rainy night, by an ensemble comprised of Portland’s best string quartet (there, we’ve admitted it) making sounds on a wide variety of instruments, some of which include strings.

Hearing a piece of music played in total darkness is a truly singular experience. From sounds like a car engine revving to a subway car screeching, sirens, a machine and music similar to “Psycho,” the thrilling, transfixing performance of George Frederich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 performed by the Pyxis String Quartet at the Liberty Theatre on June 21 was exceptional.

A concert is never about only the music. Otherwise we’d just listen to a recording on headphones. At Pyxis Quartet’s Feb 15 concert at Portland’s Old Church, which on that rainy evening felt like the most consequential performance I’ve attended in Portland, the music offered some splendid moments.

Micah Fletcher, a survivor in the 2017 MAX train stabbings, teamed up with Oregon musicians for a poetic and musical collaboration Friday night. The performance, titled “I Spat in the Face of Hate and Lived,” was held at the Old Church concert venue and organized by the 45^th Parallel Universe chamber series.

Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint Georges), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Florence Price, and Daniel Bernard Roumain. None of these composers are household names but all are finally starting to get the attention they deserve. On Friday, in celebration of Black History Month, 45^th Parallel Universe presents Sons of the Soil, a concert featuring music by these black composers performed by the all female string quartet mousai REMIX.