On March 1 Vijay Gupta, violinist and artistic director of Street Symphony, joined 45th Parallel Universe for a performance at Polaris Hall. I may have said 45th Parallel Universe, but it would be better to say this was an F.O.G. production–that’s Friends of Greg, meaning Greg Ewer, 45th Parallel co-founder and one of the great violinists within Portland’s chamber music scene.

The concerts he curates for 45th Parallel tend towards Baroque music, folk tunes, and contemporary American music, striking an intriguing balance among these seemingly disparate worlds, and this performance was no different. Gupta previously joined F.O.G. back in 2023 for a concert featuring music by Reena Esmail, Kenji Bunch and Arvo Pärt, among others.

This is the first time I’ve seen a contemporary classical concert at Polaris Hall. Like many venues in Portland, Polaris is a repurposed ballroom, a much smaller cousin to Wonder Ballroom or the Crystal Ballroom. The straightforward interior also reminded me of The Old Madeleine Church, which has become an emerging spot for chamber music in the city. The acoustics in the space worked surprisingly well for string instruments, providing just enough room ambience to fill out the sound without things becoming muddy and washed-out.

For the two quartets on the program, Gupta took the role of first violin within the Pyxis Quartet, replacing Ron Blessinger, 45th Parallel’s former executive director and current development and production coordinator. Gupta blended well with the ensemble and acted as the leader through some of the tougher passages of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

One did get a sense of Gupta’s broader musical and extra-musical views from his stage banter, in which he showed an enthusiastic and intelligent demeanor. He quoted Rilke at length, and mentioned a theory that the Baroque musical form Passacaglia actually came from the New World, imported from Peru. From my cursory research I couldn’t find much to corroborate this claim. The scholar Thomas Walker, writing about the origins of the Passacaglia and the similar musical form of the Chaconne, dismisses it as a rumor. Nonetheless, it provided some intriguing context for the music we’d just heard.

The many faces of Vijay Gupta

Sponsor

The performance began with two Passacaglias, one each by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Johan Halvorsen, back-to-back with no introduction. The quartet began scattered around the audience, playing a short and spacious introduction to the processional. This didn’t seem to be part of the original piece by Biber, and I welcomed its addition. Gupta slowly marched towards the stage from the back left corner through the duration of the solo. The dynamic shifts were engrossing, and the amount of variations created over the most basic four-note theme were astounding. The performance showcased Baroque music at its best. 

That led seamlessly into Halvorsen’s Passacaglia for violin and cello. The late 19th century Norwegian composer based the piece on a theme from Handel’s Suite in G Minor. The chord progression upon which the variations were built reminded me of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves, and I enjoyed how chromatic some of the variations got. The audience was dead quiet through the piece, thanks to a great performance by Ewer and Pyxis cellist Marilyn de Olivera. 

The viola and cello duo Limestone and Felt by Caroline Shaw I found a bit unremarkable. It felt formulaic compared to other chamber pieces by Shaw, such as her string quartet Entr’acte. As soon as I was getting into the groove of one moment, it would move on to the next idea. To me the cumulative effect of all these moments was not much. The performance by Olivera and Pyxis violist Charles Noble was solid, but maybe they could’ve sold the music more effectively by emphasizing the textural contrasts and character shifts that Shaw’s music revels in at its best. 

After that came Osvaldo Golijov’s Tenebrae. (Angela Allen profiled the composer for ArtsWatch back in 2021; you can read it here.) The low orange lighting helped sell the feeling of a funeral procession. The music hinges on some simple but effective harmonies that leave a lot of space for somber reflection. The purity of the C major harmonies break out into phrygian minor cadenzas, and there’s a sort of nervous energy underlying the music, with many tremolos and trills. 

Sponsor

The quartet’s take on Death and the Maiden was a bit understated, which I liked. It never felt like the musicians were trying to wring every last bit of drama from the notes on the page. It was never bombastic, and the tenderness of the soft passages made the moments that were loud feel all the more explosive. The last two movements, typical of early Romantic sonata form, were more energetic. The ensemble also had some fun teasing the ending of the quartet: whenever it felt as though the music was gonna end, Schubert cleverly kept it going.

Music and activism

Gupta has been called a “radical” by The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross, which is admittedly not a hard label to earn in the typically conservative world of classical music. I always feel a bit nonplussed by claims that one is doing radical political work by hosting a concert. Music isn’t in itself activism; music is music, and activism is activism. If one wishes to communicate a political message, there are far easier ways of doing so than writing a piece of music.

It is impossible for us to disentangle these aspects of ourselves, however, and one’s work in political activism and thoughts on politics will influence one’s music and vice-versa. Composers have long used political ideas and current events as inspiration for their music; it’s simply that it’s hard to communicate an obvious political message via music alone.

The clearest instance of this on the concert program was Golijov’s Tenebrae. The composer had this to say in his program notes: 

“I wrote Tenebrae as a consequence of witnessing two contrasting realities in a short period of time in September 2000. I was in Israel at the start of the new wave of violence that is still continuing today, and a week later I took my son to the new planetarium in New York, where we could see the Earth as a beautiful blue dot in space … The compositional challenge was to write music that would sound as an orbiting spaceship that never touches ground. After finishing the composition, I realized that Tenebrae could be heard as the slow, quiet reading of an illuminated medieval manuscript in which the appearances of the voice singing the letters of the Hebrew Alphabet (from Yod to Nun, as in Couperin) signal the beginning of new chapters, leading to the ending section, built around a single, repeated word: Jerusalem.” 

The new wave of violence he refers to appears to be the Second Intifada. At the performance Gupta asked the audience to picture their own Jerusalem. The city acts as a metaphor for a homeland, a promised land, a refuge. This is a very charged metaphor to use at this point in time, and it left me considering some difficult questions: What is this promised land worth to us? Is it worth fighting to the death for? Is it worth killing for?

I can imagine that Golijov, an Argentinian Jewish composer who has lived in Israel at various points in his life, has some complicated thoughts on his own Jerusalem. Regardless of how he feels about his inspiration – or for that matter, how I, Gupta, or any given audience member feel about it – Golijov was able to channel those feelings into an engaging piece of music that raises questions without demanding any specific answers.

Sponsor

Tenebrae acted as the concert’s centerpiece, around which were placed Baroque and Neo-Baroque music, Shaw’s textural formalism, and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. In this way, it shakes us from our comfortable foundations. We then have to grapple with how the rest of the music could be as politically or socially charged as the centerpiece. 

Gupta described the hocket used in Limestone and Felt as “dancing in the gaps.” This to me wasn’t just a nice turn-of-phrase or effective analogy, but a metaphor for the difficulties of political and social work. People who are oppressed by an unjust and unequal society must find ways to survive and thrive on the margins. Dancing in the gaps, as it were. Those who wish to dance in the gaps also need something to dance to.