The Oregon Symphony’s three-week Sounds Like Portland festival in late October and early November brings home the truth: Portland is a hotbed of engaging and eclectic music, but too often the symphony has left its composers and performers out in the rain.

Not for these three weeks, though, and especially not for The Seven Deadly Sins concert Nov. 1 (repeated Nov. 2) at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall that showcased Portland composition and improv kings, a performance queen with a cult-like following, and a 15-year-old music-maker with a cunning sense of humor.

Minus some amplification problems and a Richard Wagner warhorse, the two-hour concert with intermission brought surprises and well-deserved stand-up applause – a standard Portland ritual.

The world premiere of prolific Portland-via-New-York composer David Schiff’s jazzy piano concerto Uptown/Downtown was the evening’s high point, inspired in part by the Langston Hughes 1951 poem, “Dream Deferred,’’ published the same year in the collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. Portland master improviser/jazz-pianist/composer Darrell Grant brought the 21-minute piece to unpredictable exuberant life on the Steinway grand, proving Thelonius Monk’s assertion that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”

Schiff complained about the meek piano acoustics, but I didn’t hear the orchestra drown out the piano. (My ears aren’t as acute as Schiff’s.) Jazz piano is usually played in smaller settings rather than in vast concert halls, so it’s essential to adequately amp it up when going solo in such venues as the Schnitz, especially when the orchestra is playing behind it. Apparently, the acoustics were adjusted for the Sunday concert, Schiff said, and it sounded much better. (I attended the Saturday concert.) 

Though all Schiff ‘s composition – other than Grant’s improvisation – Uptown/Downtown’s execution throughout its gestation period was a collaboration between Schiff and Grant, most notably on the stretches of Grant’s improvisational parts. Reinforcing the jazz flavor and structure were an alto sax and a percussion-heavy contingent with timpani, xylophone, vibraphone, glockenspiel, two tomtoms, snare and bass drums, suspended cymbal, triangle, wood block, maracas, two metal blocks and a clave. Schiff insists that the walls come down between classical and jazz music (read Charles Rose’s interview with Schiff here).

Hughes’ mid-20th-century famous poem “Dream Deferred” that speaks to the massive immigration of Blacks from the South to Harlem was the first movement, titled “Montage, after Langston Hughes.” It was an exciting though controlled cinematic cacophony reminiscent of city sounds. The concerto’s second part, “Variations: Vanguard Memories” was an homage to the Village Vanguard, New York City’s 90-year-old Greenwich Village jazz club where, if you’re lucky, you might be able to hear The Bad Plus or Bill Charlap. It’s a place – and Schiff loves writing about place – where jazz musicians understand they have not arrived until performing in its hallowed basement. In the “Vanguard” section, Grant had free rein to improvise, said Schiff, a retired 39-year Reed College composition professor. “Darrell was able to shape the size of these improvised passages by asking the orchestra to repeat them a certain number of times – his choice. Each time, Darrell made the music more and more his own – just as I had hoped.”

Sponsor

Though you could hear strains of Gershwin, Ellington, and other jazz and classical giants – “the influences of a lifetime” as Schiff, 80, wrote in a post-concert email – “the piano part deliberately echoes Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans.” (Schiff has never hidden the fact that Frank Zappa and Charles Mingus are his main influences.) The second movement, “Variations: Vanguard Memories,” begins with “a gymnopédie a la Satie and Ravel,” but Schiff said he reshaped the form, “accelerating variations on the last movement of Beethoven’s final piano sonata.” 

Schiff explains his compositional strategy:

“Early on I decided to base the first movement on the words, images and rhythms of the Langston Hughes poem. It became a large dramatic musical mural. Because of its length I didn’t think there would be time for the usual three-movement form. Then I realized that the last Beethoven piano sonata. op. 111, provided a good model for a dramatic first movement followed by a second movement that gradually evolved from slow to fast. Beethoven used a slow, lyrical theme in 3/4 time, followed by variations that became increasingly fast. I decided to write my slow 3/4 theme in the dreamy floating style of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies (which Debussy arranged for orchestra). Satie really came up with modern jazz harmony in the 1880s! John Lewis and Bill Evans often echoed these pieces. The calm, gentle motion of this theme increases in speed with each of the variations: a barcarolle, a slow jazz waltz, an Ewe dance, and a fast jazz waltz, followed by a coda. The Ewe dance is a style of music from Ghana, which I studied with the great master drummer Alfred Ladzekpo at Columbia University.”

Rosy future

Though the evening’s undisputed highlight, Schiff’s music wasn’t the only game on stage. After hearing the opening post-intermission piece, Schiff said that the future of innovative classical music “looks rosy,” commenting on the 15-year-old Alejandro Belgique’s energetic Ostinato. The work is based on his efforts to transcribe video-game music, especially that of Mario Kart Wii. Alejandro was quoted in the program notes that his work was further influenced by such pieces as Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which happened to be playing while he was thinking up his composition. His piece uses cyclic repetitive patterns allowing for variation but insists on a recognizable pattern.

Ostinato premiered in 2024 with the Metropolitan Youth Symphony’s Concert Orchestra, though Alejandro wrote it several years earlier as a seventh-grader. The son of Oregon Symphony’s assistant principal second violinist Ines Voglar and retired principal violist Joel Belgique, Alejandro has the genes, imagination and exclusive training with Lewis and Clark composition professor Michael Johanson to make his own music. Add to that his five years with Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project that helps students to develop creativity and skill to work with multiple classical ensemble’s instruments, said Jeff Payne, director of the Young Composers program.

“From the time Alejandro started composing, he has shown a remarkable musical imagination,” Payne said via email. “He is constantly exploring new sounds, new harmonies and new forms in his writing. He soaks up new influences and uses them to create music with his own style and personality. A lot of his music shows a sly sense of humor. His experience playing oboe in Portland Youth Philharmonic gives him hands-on knowledge of how an orchestra works and how to get the most from the instruments available.”

Payne noted that the Young Composers workshop format “is the only one of its kind in the country” and has resulted in producing many state, regional and national composition winners.

Sponsor

Oregon Symphony Orchestra four-year conductor David Danzmayer said he heard Ostinato awhile back and immediately knew it had legs and that its composer possessed uncanny talent. Speedy, fiery and 6 minutes short, Alejandro composed his piece for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, clarinets, four horns, two trumpets, two bassoons and a contrabassoon, tuba, three trombones, timpani, percussion, piano and strings. Ostinato was a crowd-pleaser and a big stage for a young person’s work.

Divine decadence

Speaking of big stages, high-profile performer/singer Storm Large played the two-sided Anna role in Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins, composed in 1933 when Germany was at the height of decadence between World War I and II. It was the final piece on the program, and at 35 minutes, the most dramatic. As the program notes explain, “Divine decadence rules throughout as the bifurcated dancer-singer Anna makes her way through life as a cabaret dancer/stripper, a movie actress, a rich man’s mistress, a two-timing temptress and eventually a reformed soul who just wants to live quietly in her new house on the banks of the Mississippi.” 

With Brecht’s words, the capitalistic decadence is underscored. As much as Brecht, who was a Marxist, hated Weill (and the feeling was mutual), he collaborated with him – ironically, no doubt, for the money.

Deadly Sins was the ideal vehicle for Large, who can do louche better than anyone. She has a huge stage presence, no matter what her gig (she sang with Pink Martini for a while, including at the Kennedy Center, to sold-out crowds).

In Deadly Sins, she walks onstage looking dowdy in a plain coat worn over a long red dress, but then she takes off the coat as the sins accumulate and her journey takes her cross-country. Once the coat is shed, she spends a good part of the piece, all the while singing and acting to the hilt, tossing her loosened breasts around to a much delighted audience, at least to the guy sitting next to me – and she never drops her Southern drawl. All kinds of musical genres pop up throughout, including a barbershop quartet, an opera scene and a triumphal march to illustrate the progression of sins. The music is clever if the text is overdone and incredibly didactic.

The four men of Hudson Shad, who portrayed the chorus and represented grounded family values, were hard to understand. They performed with Large at the Princeton Festival in 2022 and earlier with her and OSO, so the singers knew each other, but the four guys, as lauded as they are, didn’t add much to this piece. It was all Large, the closest person to Hollywood that Portland has.

Why “Tannhäuser”?

Finally, how did Wagner’s “Overture to Tannhäuser” fit into the program? It was a pleasant opener, even if Wagner gives you the chills, but it felt as if the overture was lined up first to simply get it over with so the real show could begin.

Sponsor

OSO conductor Danzmayr was the one rhetorically to ask the “why Tannhäuser” question when introducing the two-hour concert. Turns out the Wagner overture, which the guy sitting next to me called “mediocre movie music,” anchored the first Oregon Symphony concert in 1896. So why not honor the past of a Portland institution?

However, the Oregon Symphony, which many concertgoers consider the heart of Portland music, has spread its wings to land in contemporary places with the Sounds Like Portland festival. In the future, let’s hope that means more locally made music and fewer salutes to dead guys’ warhorses.

Ask the teacher

After the concert Oregon ArtsWatch spoke with Alejandro Belgique’s composition teacher Michael Johanson, a professor of music and composition at Portland’s Lewis and Clark College as well as a decorated in-demand composer. He has been teaching Alejandro, the composer of Ostinato, for more than five years. Alejandro is now a freshman at Lincoln High School, though he wrote the six-minute piece when he was a seventh-grader.

We were curious about Alejandro’s composing process and how Johanson teaches the art of creating music. Below is a Question and Answer interview with Johanson, edited for clarity and brevity,

Oregon ArtsWatch: In your lessons, how do you work on composing with Alejandro? 

Michael Johanson: We approach the study of composition in a variety of ways. This includes working on compositional études, some of which carry various restrictions; doing close analyses of scores and recordings for studying aspects of form, texture, motive, melody, harmony, rhythm and more; completing “fill in the blank” exercises in which the object is to fill in redacted portions of existing compositions in ways that feel musically appropriate; and doing improvisational exercises with guidelines designed to explore musical ideas that may eventually find their way into a composition.

OAW: Jeff Payne, director of Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project, says that Alejandro has a “sly sense of humor.” How does that apply to his music, though his piece was certainly fun to listen to?

Sponsor

Johanson: Alejandro has a wonderful knack for presenting the listener with intriguing musical ideas that are unexpected but that ultimately feel inevitable, due to their close integration into the overall structure of a piece. His music often leads the listener through witty twists and turns, and the ways in which he threads such explorations into the larger narrative of his compositions is part of what makes his music such a delight to experience.

OAW: What is Alejandro’s composing process? 

Johanson: Alejandro is a very careful thinker, and this is evident in his compositional process. I have often noticed that when he is contemplating an important compositional decision, he is able to quickly enter a hyper-focused headspace from which he emerges with striking and intriguing ideas and solutions. I continue to be impressed with how firmly Alejandro feels about his creative decisions, once he feels he has given due consideration to various alternative possibilities. He clearly knows what he wants, and why he wants it.

OAW: Does he compose on the piano?

Johanson: Improvisation plays a huge role in Alejandro’s process, and I believe he does much of his work at the piano. That said, he has a very acute ear, and my sense is that many of his ideas take root and are largely formed in his imagination without the aid of a piano.

OAW: He has been in the Young Composers Project for five years. How have you seen him change musically, and in terms of confidence?

Johanson: Alejandro has explored many different facets of musical style in his composition, and it has been fascinating to witness his developing artistic voice, which draws on so many interesting and varied influences. His most recent work clearly reflects his skill as a colorist and orchestrator who has a highly developed sense of musical drama and form.

Sponsor

OAW: Tell me some of his strengths as a young composer, aside from a sense of humor and the nourishment and encouragement of musician parents. His piece debuted when he was in 7th grade so he is VERY young to be making such a musical mark.

Johanson: Alejandro’s ability to create intriguing contrasts in mood and texture that coexist within a cohesive musical statement is remarkable. His vibrant treatment of melodic and harmonic material, along with his captivating rhythmic language and use of appealing contrapuntal textures, always make his work exciting.

OAW: What does his music tell us about the future of contemporary classical music and its direction?

Johanson: If Alejandro’s music tells us anything about the future of contemporary classical music, I think we can say with certainty that we can expect this music to thrive! His work is also a testament to the “village” who has so carefully nourished him. His ever-supportive parents, Inés and Joël (fantastic musicians themselves), along with so many individuals and organizations, such as Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project, the Metropolitan Youth Symphony, the Portland Youth Conservatory Orchestra of the Portland Youth Philharmonic (PYCO), Chamber Music Northwest, the Oregon Symphony, and many others, have all been part of a support network that is so valuable for young artists.