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MusicWatch Weekly: gratitunes

By Brett Campbell
November 22, 2017
Featured, Music

Even on this traditionally home-focused Thanksgiving week, several attractive concerts, like Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn, Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends, and Friday’s Portland Cellohead Project show have already sold out, but if you’re craving a euphonic dessert after Thursday’s feasting (assuming you’re one of the lucky ones who are able to feast at this time of surging Oregon homelessness), here’s some recommendations from Oregon’s musical menus. If you have other recommendations, please list in the comments section below. And enjoy this holiday devoted to gratitude. We ArtsWatchers are certainly grateful to our readers and supporters for helping us bring Oregon arts to you all year. If you’d like to express your gratitude in a tangible way that will help us do that, here’s how.

Christopher Corbell’s music is showcased at Portland’s Old Church Concert Hall Tuesday. Photo: Gary Stallsworth.

Mannheim Steamroller
Oregon Symphony members join the long-running synth-stoked holiday music show (actually born not in Germany but in Omaha) that’s so popular it’s performing in two cities hundreds of miles apart on the same night during this tour.
Friday, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland, and Sunday, Hult Center, Eugene.

Portland Cello Project
Friday’s show is sold out, but you can catch the celloriffic ensemble’s tribute to OK Computer — still my fave Radiohead album — that requires a full band, winds and brass to even attempt to capture its dark richness.
Saturday, Revolution Hall, Portland.

FearNoMusic
Classical composers including Brahms, the French composers known as Les Six, and others have occasionally teamed up to write a collaborative composition, and that’s what Portland’s fearless new music ensemble asked four of Portland’s best (and very different) composers to do for them. Renee Favand-See, Texu Kim, Mike Hsu, and Jay Derderian have each written a movement for flute, viola and piano based on material from a famous Franz Liszt bagatelle. The show also includes separate music by another Portlander, Ryan Francis, and two acclaimed non Oregonians, Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian and Israeli-American composer Shulamit Ran.
Monday, The Old Church, Portland.

Paquito d’Rivera performs at Portland State Monday.

Paquito D’Rivera
The jazz show — make that shows — of the week features a fourteen-time Grammy-winner who also boasts an NEA Jazz Masters Award, National Medal of the Arts and more. The Havana-born composer, saxophonist and clarinet virtuoso plays his music and arrangements in three different settings: with the PSU Jazz Ensemble; with a chamber ensemble featuring PSU faculty artists Hamilton Cheifetz, Julia Lee and Darrell Grant; and with a quintet led by one of Oregon’s own finest jazz artists, keyboard master/composer/PSU prof George Colligan.
Monday, Portland State University’s Lincoln Performance Hall.

Cult of Orpheus
Ace Portland composer Christopher Corbell follows his 2015 hit local opera Viva’s Holiday, with Daphne, a mythological opera miniature; The Emerald Tablet, a new work for vocal quartet and string quartet inspired by an influential alchemic text and informed by baroque and earlier influences; his new string quartet Give them space, commissioned for Keller Auditorium’s centennial; and music from his forthcoming two-act opera, Antigone and Haimon, for chorus, winds, and percussion, all performed by top Portland musicians. Corbell’s imaginative evolutions out of classic forms like opera and art song, enriched by his earlier singer-songwriter expertise, into a cohesive, compelling 21st century art music (or as he puts it, “poetic utterance and organic melody-based composition”) constitute one of Oregon music’s most fascinating ongoing developments. The former Classical Revolution PDX leader’s determination to glean the best from ancient forms born in aristocratic or otherwise anti-democratic contexts and infuse them with his original, contemporary artistic sensibility and progressive ideals is especially welcome in this (temporary, we hope) reactionary moment.
Tuesday, The Old Church Concert Hall, Portland.

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