Eugene Weekly

With so many American schools cutting back their arts programs, nonprofit organizations play an increasingly larger role in showing young people the beauty of making music. This month offers several kid-oriented music events, beginning with a May 9 lecture at the UO Collier House by University of Washington prof Patricia Shehan Campbell, “Giving Voice to the Children: Their Music and Musical Ideas.” Saturday morning, May 17, at the Hult Center, the Eugene Symphony plays a youth concert narrated by popular local actor Bill Hulings. Continue reading →

American “classical” music often finds a more welcome reception in choral concerts than in orchestra halls. Maybe it has something to do with the enormous popularity of choral music; nearly 30 million Americans — a tenth of the population — sing at least occasionally in a choir of some kind, whether it’s in school or church, amateur or professional. Maybe that’s why American folk and choral music sometimes seem like kissing cousins. Continue reading →

Thursday, April 17, at the Hult Center, the Eugene Symphony plays three 19th-century Euro-classics: Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia, Schumann’s Piano Concerto (featuring the esteemed soloist Antonio Pompa-Baldi) and Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3. It’s a typical program for American orchestras that regard classical music as a historical museum of centuries-old artifacts from Europe. Continue reading →

“We might play a piece 30, 40, 50 — sometimes 100 times,” eighth blackbird flutist Tim Munro told me a few years ago. That dedication to rehearsal allows the Grammy-winning, Chicago-based new music sextet to memorize its pieces, which “enables us to have interactions within the group that I never thought were possible in chamber music,” the Australian Munro said, to focus not just on getting the notes but on communicating the music to the audience. Continue reading →

Eugene Symphony brings a trio of top singers to join its chorus for the Thursday, March 20, performance of Haydn’s great oratorio, The Creation, at the Hult. After one of the most famous opening scenes in music — nothing less than what we’d now call the Big Bang — the great classical composer doesn’t need no stinkin’ sets or theatrical props, using only his most colorful music to paint scenic portraits of the events and even animals described in the Christian creation myth.  Continue reading →

More than half a century before Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, Clint Eastwood et al brought us an Italian view of the American West’s good/bad old days, New York’s Metropolitan Opera asked famed Italian composer Giacomo Puccini to make a new opera from a play of the Gold Rush days. Continue reading →

It’s easy to miss some of the many excellent musicians who swing through town, thanks to conflicts with other shows, a skimpy entertainment budget or simply an overabundance of awesomeness. This month offers numerous second-chance opportunities to catch some highly recommended performers you may have missed last time around — or didn’t, and want to catch again. Continue reading →

Many question whether classical music can survive its self-inflicted wounds: aging, demographically narrow (read: predominantly old, white, rich) audiences; endless recycling of the same old tunes from long-dead European composers; bloodless performances in audience-unfriendly settings, etc. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the winds — Imani Winds. Since 1997, the quintet’s concerts have mixed classical, jazz and world music, much of it contemporary, some composed by group members. Continue reading →

Thanks primarily to a pair of forward-looking institutions, Eugene keeps attracting visiting vanguard artists that just about any other midsized mini-metropolis would envy. This month, one of them snags three young stars who are also appearing at the big Portland Jazz Festival that annually brings some of world’s finest improvisers to the Northwest. On Feb. 19, The Shedd brings back one of jazz’s greatest drummers, Brian Blade, and his mighty Fellowship Band. Continue reading →

After joining and then replacing the great Thomas Mapfumo in the Zimbabwean band Wagon Wheels in the late 1970s, Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi became one of Southern Africa’s most popular singers, rasping his uplifting lyrics in his native Shona language, as well as in Ndebele and English, over a bubbling beat of compulsively danceable mbaqanga and other African rhythms and American R&B-influenced grooves. Continue reading →