Through a Sax Darkly

A week of premieres places Oregon on the concert map.

Performance It says something rather extraordinary, either about the luck of the draw or the richness of Oregon's classical music scene, that in the space of one week we could experience three premieres, from ... More

Wednesday, July 10, 2002 Grant Menzies

Getting Somewhere

Carlos Kalmar, the Oregon Symphony's well-traveled new music director, maps out the future.

Performance Whether it was the foreordained scheming of fate or a spur-of-the-moment revelation, something made teenage violin student Carlos Kalmar approach the director of Vienna Music High School and ask t ... More

Wednesday, July 3, 2002 Grant Menzies

VIVALDI IN BLOOM

The chamber ensemble Magnolia awakens the well-worn Four Seasons.

Performance Climate-wise, last Friday couldn't have been more appropriate for a performance of Antonio Vivaldi's hyper-descriptive violin concerti, Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons). Like the poor shephe ... More

Wednesday, June 12, 2002 Grant Menzies

Thoroughly Modern Meiji

Silk, ivory and gold make up most of Imperial Japan's splendor in PAM's new exhibit.

Visual Arts Amid the trappings of 20th-century Japan, samurai-born Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto would remember the wholesale exhumation of ancient ritual for the 1912 funeral of Emperor Meiji. By a tradition two ... More

Wednesday, June 5, 2002 Grant Menzies

Pacific Pursuits

Japanese culture extends beyond Japan, as the latest PAM exhibit reminds us.

Visual Arts Art heals.That may sound like some starry-eyed maxim from the herbs-and-crystals '80s, but in a very real sense, art does just that. Unlike religion, it unconditionally binds up the wounds of old ... More

Wednesday, May 29, 2002 Grant Menzies

De Profundis

In the middle of Nazi terror, art--especially classical music--managed to thrive,
as on OS concert reveals

Performance On the eve of his 1944 deportation to Auschwitz from the Czech transit camp of Terezín (formerly Theresienstadt), composer Viktor Ullmann penned a steely valediction to his imprisonment. "T ... More

Wednesday, April 17, 2002 Grant Menzies

Joyful and Triumphant

Two Baroque Christmas concerts become a lavish weekend package.

Performance One would be hard pressed to find anywhere (and within the same 48 hours) the quantity and quality of Baroque splendors lavished on Portland last weekend. Portland Baroque Orchestra offered Handel ... More

Wednesday, December 19, 2001 Grant Menzies

The Real Camille

The latest candidate for Oregon Symphony's conductor, Carlos Kalmar, succeeds with Saint-Sa�ns.

Performance Like the voices of our more memorable opera singers (the recorded many of the past and the living few of the present), the timbre of a truly distinctive instrumentalist can always be picked out of ... More

Wednesday, October 24, 2001 Grant Menzies

Tears for Violetta

Soprano Andrea Trebnik takes on the difficult La Traviata for her Portland Opera debut.

Performance As we rediscovered a couple of weeks ago, life is no party. Yet even when death insists on having the last word, the human hunger for life and love puts up a good fight. And that*to paraphrase the ... More

Wednesday, September 26, 2001 Grant Menzies

Beaux Ideals

WW's new classical critic, Grant Menzies, takes a quick glance at the state of the art in Portland.

Performance A professional critic's job is to ask for something beyond possibility. Some go after it with venom-tipped nibs, but most are just doggedly persistent idealists whose personal vision of a work of ... More

Wednesday, August 29, 2001 Grant Menzies