Like so many feats of German engineering – the printing press, the cuckoo clock, the Volkswagen, LSD – the symphony orchestra is an ingenious, intricate, elegant, expensive invention, extravagant almost to the point of being wasteful, and absolutely worth it.

Consider the basic structure of an orchestra: At a minimum you need a few dozen highly skilled string players, plus assorted highly skilled wind and brass players, plus maybe a percussionist or two, all playing on instruments that are well-engineered and therefore expensive, performing from printed sheet music, all held together by a highly skilled maestro waving his or her arms and making all manner of commanding gestures and facial expressions to make sure everything is Done Perfectly.

Already we can hear some of you pundits clearing your throats. “What about Corelli?” and “VW Bugs are hardly expensive” and “Most of the great orchestral composers were Austrian, not German” and “Well, actually, LSD was first synthesized in Switzerland.” Humbug!

Moving on, then. The outstanding feature of orchestral music is that it remains one of the last forms of music that must be experienced live, in concert, in a concert hall with decent acoustics (a good church will naturally do just as well). You can listen to it on speakers at home – the present author is currently enjoying Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Philadelphia Orchestra’s Grammy-winning recording of Florence Price’s first and third symphonies on a nice pair of Edifiers – but it’s music meant for the concert hall. And here’s why: All those musicians!

The normal complement of strings, as every first-year orchestration student knows, is this: 16 first violins, 14 second violins, 10-12 violas, 10-12 cellos, 8-10 basses. That’s sixty-odd players right there, essentially a dozen string quartets plus all those basses plus the concertmaster.

Why? Why bother with that many string players? It’s the same reason choirs have so many singers on each part: acoustics. When you have that many musicians playing in unison it not only boosts the volume, it also boosts the acoustic richness of each part. Tiny variations within each part, the unique sonic signature of each musician, combine to create a shimmering “chorus” effect – what, you didn’t know that’s why your guitar pedal was called that?

Add winds and brasses and percussion for color, and remember that these instruments are all capable of a dynamic range that no speaker setup can replicate – from the faint whisper of brushes on a snare drum 100 yards away all the way up to the mind-shattering blast of a giant brass section going bananas at full volume.

Then there’s the 3D aspect: It’s not just that there are so many players, it’s the way they’re distributed across the stage. That oboe solo is coming from right there; that heraldic chorale in the French horns is coming from just over here; the strings are coming from everywhere. The conductor’s job is not just arm-waving and tempo-keeping; the main job is tuning this motley mess into a beautifully balanced sound world, every player attuned to one another, all attuned to the specific venue and to the audiences who will fill it on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.

All of this is why it takes a “composer” and not just a “songwriter” to create music for an orchestra. That’s why we have different names for what is superficially the same job of stringing notes together. It’s an expensive affair, this orchestra business, and often enough the institution has come close to dying away just like any other church fading into obscurity in the face of modernism.

This is why we have to go easy on them for playing the Old Reliables so often. In fact, there are two reasons for that. One is the simple tautology that keeping a tradition alive is how you keep a tradition alive. The other is that audiences will generally be more willing to exchange their hard-earned money for tickets to a concert where they’ll hear something they know will be worth it – Beethoven’s Ninth being the customary example – than they will for some untested modernist composer they’ve never heard of and will probably hate (yes, we’re still mad about that ugly Unsuk Chin violin concerto from five years ago).

The corollary to that: film-score concerts, kids’ concerts, pop-group mashup concerts, video game concerts, social justice concerts, all the stuff where you hedge your bets by bringing in a New Reliable from artistic traditions that are newer and more popular (by which we mean “market tested”). It works, and gods bless ‘em for doing what they can to keep the flame burning.

Here in Oregon we have rather more orchestras than you might expect. There’s the Really Big One: That would be Your Oregon Symphony, which produces dozens of concerts every season and keeps hundreds of musicians from having to get their hands dirty at stupid day jobs. However much we might go hard on this august institution (the oldest orchestra west of the Mississippi) we will always, always, always be grateful to them for this simple fact. The shit-talking is simply holding the royals to the highest possible standard.

Many of Oregon’s other orchestras are, unsurprisingly, clustered in the Portland metro area. Most of them are specialty orchestras of some kind, focused on Baroque music or young musicians or Mozart or whatever. There are also symphony orchestras based in the state’s other major population centers, Salem and Eugene and Bend and the Rogue Valley. And there are few in some surprising places.

What we propose to do here is select from each organization’s season either one or two specific concerts or one particular feature. We start this week with Part One of this symphonic two-parter, focused on the Portland orchestras – not because we have any specific love for Stumptown itself, but because its critical mass dictates that most of the state’s population (and thus wealth) is concentrated there. Worry not, though: We’ll get into The Rest of Oregon in Part Two.

For now, then, let’s start with the Really Big One.

Your Oregon Symphony (Portland)

This season’s theme is “The Nature of Music,” and the concerts accordingly feature plenty of the usual suspects – most notably Beethoven’s Sixth (the one you remember from Fantasia) and Mahler’s Third. The one concert we want to talk about fits into this theme, but stands out for another reason: It features a large-scale work by an Oregon composer. Next June, OSO will perform the complete orchestral version of Celilo Falls: We Were There by composer Nancy Ives, storyteller Ed Edmo, and photographer Joe Cantrell.

You may have read all about this one here at ArtsWatch: We covered its premiere with Portland Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Yaacov Bergman (read that here and here), and again when it was performed at this summer’s Siletz Bay Music Festival (read that here). You can get a taste of Ives’ “nature music” with the following three videos: “N’Chewana” (a movement from Celilo Falls) performed at SBMF a few years back; Edmo and Ives performing Songs from Celilo at Resonance Ensemble’s Earth’s Protection in June of last year; and Ives’ recent The Spirit of the Columbia, premiered by Portland Youth Philharmonic earlier this year.

“Celilo Falls: We Were There” will be performed by the Oregon Symphony on June 6-9, 2025. Tickets and more information available here.

***

Portland Chamber Orchestra (Portland)

PCO’s season is titled “Pillars of Portland,” which is a bit odd since its concerts happen in Beaverton (mostly at The Reser) and largely feature music by English or European composers (short works by Caroline Shaw and Kenji Bunch notwithstanding). Never mind that, though: They all seem to be fine concerts, and Oregon Symphony associate conductor Deanna Tham (stepping in for long-time PCO leader Bergman, who died last September at 78) will no doubt crush it.

But the one concert we’re excited about this season features a different conductor, who also no doubt will crush it: Metropolitan Youth Symphony artistic director Raúl Gomez-Rojas will lead the orchestra and a variety of guests in the multimedia presentation “Every Brain Needs (Love) Music” on Valentine’s Day, 2025. If that title sounds familiar, it’s probably from PCO’s partnership last year with author and OHSU neuroscientist Larry Sherman; that Valentine’s Day concert was called “How Your Brain Responds to Music, Love and Chocolate” (read about it here), and Sherman’s book is titled Every Brain Needs Music.

PCO, Gomez-Rojas, and Sherman are joined by an impressive cast of guests: soprano Taylenne Juliana Ubieta Johnson, winner of this year’s PCO Young Artist Competition; Naomi LaViolette, a powerhouse vocalist, songwriter, and pianist well-known locally for her work as a choral composer and collaborator; another Oregon powerhouse, singer Marilyn Keller; and a flutist who is literally a Native Oregonian, James Edmund Greeley.

“Every Brain Needs (Love) Music” happens on Valentine’s Day, 2025. More information and tickets available here.

***

Metropolitan Youth Symphony (Portland)

That there are two youth orchestras in Portland is remarkable; that they manage to balance The Classics and new work by living and/or American composers – often young musicians themselves – is even more remarkable. The four concerts of the upcoming MYS season each have something to get excited about, so let’s take them all in turn.

First up is November’s “The Force of Love,” which will feature some Beethoven, some Tchaikovsky, Missy Mazzoli’s Orpheus Undone, and the “world premiere of a piece by a student composer, as part of The Authentic Voice commissioning series in partnership with Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project.” Next is January’s “A Powerful Voice Rises,” featuring the winners of the orchestra’s annual concerto competition and “the world premiere of a composition from a YCP/Authentic Voice student composer, and a special star guest (more on that soon!)”

A few things stand out about MYS’s March concert “Music for Millions: Film and Video Games.” There’s the concert title’s callout to the long-forgotten ‘40s musical, semi-notorious for its use of many popular classical hits by Debussy and Dvořák. There’s a suite of music from Star Wars by John Williams, The Greatest American Composer of All Time. The concert opens with Christopher Tin’s Lango language song “Waloyo Yamoni.” There’s a suite of music by an MYS alum who Went Away And Made It – Steffan Schmidt, composer for film, video games, and VR. They’ll perform Schmidt’s music for Palia, a “life simulation massively multiplayer online game.” 

The concert concludes with the premiere of Music for a Short Animated Film; you read about the first round of this project last year, when MYS performed the music by itself. Now, the cartoon is ready, and the performance will be accompanied by “the premiere screening of a short film by young animators from Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow.”

Finally we have the season-closer next June, when esperanza spalding comes back to town. We quote the announcement in full:

MYS is proud to welcome barrier-breaking five-time Grammy winner and Portland native esperanza spalding for its season finale.

MYS is commissioning a piece by esperanza spalding for bass, voice, and symphony, exploring the connection between the land and spirit. esperanza will perform the new work with MYS Symphony Orchestra and jazz students, along with Ebony and Ivy by esperanza spalding, and Midnight in Carlotta’s Hair by the great Wayne Shorter.

In honor of another barrier breaker, MYS will perform Florence Price’s Symphony No. 4, one of her most substantial symphonies. Composed in 1945, this work was never performed during Price’s life and was presumed lost until 2009, when it was rediscovered in her former summer home in Illinois. Price’s Symphony No. 4 received its world premiere by the Fort Smith Symphony on May 12, 2018.

MYS is no stranger to Price’s work. In 2019, Symphony Orchestra performed the U.S. West Coast premiere of Price’s Symphony No. 1, and took this piece abroad in Italy and Austria as part of its international tour that same summer.

Learn more about the MYS season right here.

***

Portland Youth Philharmonic (Portland)

A few concerts in PYP’s season remain “TBD”–specifically the “Cadenza Series” featuring the Portland Youth Conservatory Orchestra and other ensembles–and we’ll update you as those get filled in, but the season has mostly been announced and it all looks pretty good – a fine blend of familiar classics (Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich) and the American Stuff they do so well (William Grant Still, Silvestre Revueltas, John Williams). What distinguishes the musicians of PYP and MYS alike is their maturity – listen to them perform any of this beautifully written orchestral music and you forget all about their age, you forget you’re in Portland, you forget about everything except the music.

The concert that grabbed our attention is May’s “The Search for Beauty.” You get some German music, Schumann’s Manfred Overture. You get some heady British stuff, Ruth Gipps’ Second Symphony, composed not too long after England survived the Second World War. You get Shostakovich’s uncharacteristically jovial Piano Concerto No. 2, with pianist Hansen Barrett. And you get Tracing Visions by Imani Winds co-founder Valerie Coleman. Here’s the latter, performed by the Sphinx Virtuosi:

Learn more about the PYP season right here.

***

Orchestra Nova Northwest (Portland)

ONN was formerly known as Portland Columba Symphony Orchestra, and its first season with the new name has already started; you can read about its all-American opening concert with Artina McCain right here. The season’s remaining three concerts all sound great, with all the Russians you can stand (Kabalevsky and Stravinsky in November, Prokofiev and Shostakovich in May). But it’s the middle concert that delights us: In March, ONN will partner with Resonance Ensemble to perform music by Caroline Shaw, Margaret Bonds, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Resonance singing Shaw is a dream come true (they’re doing even more of it next February, when the vocal ensemble partners up with Ringdown, but you’ll hear plenty about that when the time approaches). On this concert, Resonance and ONN will perform Shaw’s To The Hands, a lovely and relatively conventional work for choir and orchestra based on Dieterich Buxtehude’s cantata Ad Manus and the famous Emma Lazarus poem The New Colossus.

Vaughan Williams is Vaughan Williams, luscious and lovely and oh so English; his Dona Nobis Pacem is, perhaps surprisingly, based on three poems by that wild American Walt Whitman.

Margaret Bonds completes this program quite perfectly. You may or may not know her work, depending on how much time you’ve spent in choirs, and you get two chances to hear her Credo this season. The first is next month, when Choral Arts Ensemble sings the choir-and-piano version. The second is this concert. Much has been made of Bonds’ friendship and collaboration with the great Langston Hughes, but it’s a different Black author who provides the text of her Credo: W.E.B. Du Bois, co-founder of the NAACP. Listen to Portland Phoenix Chamber Choir singing the work right here:

More information about ONN’s season can be found right here.

***

Portland Baroque Orchestra (Portland)

There are two things that give PBO its special character. One is that they perform a wide swathe of Baroque composers, not just the really big names (but also not neglecting those really big names). The second is the sheer creativity of their programming – notably last year’s Handelisch “pasticcio,” co-created by director Julian Perkins (read about it here), and their dedication to Very Historically Informed performances of Messiah (read about the last two years here and here).

They’re doing The Total Messiah again this year, but it’s a series of three concerts that’s got our ears perking up. On October 12 & 13, they’ll perform “Autumn” and “Winter” from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons; on March 15 & 16 they’ll do the evergreen “Spring”; and they’ll close the season April 12 & 13 with “Summer.” The first of those is mostly Vivaldi, with a bit of Handel. The second one features another example of that “sheer creativity of their programming,” in the form of a commissioned work by a living composer. They do that every now and then, keeping the Baroque tradition wonderfully alive by asking contemporary composers to do something in response to the Baroque composers we all know and love. Awhile back, it was Damien Geter’s Buh-Roke, which wins a “most hilarious title” award from us.

This time it’s Gwanwyn (Welsh for spring), by Welsh composer Rhian Samuel. Also on that program is Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in G minor, which will be worth hearing just for Perkins’ harpsichord skills.

The “Summer” concert in April closes the season with Scarlatti, Bach, and Pergolesi’s massively popular Stabat Mater.

Read about PBO’s season and get your tickets right here.

***

Tilikum Chamber Orchestra (Lake Oswego)

As we leave Portland and Part One, we pass Lake Oswego, home of the Tilikum Chamber Orchestra. This group’s commitment to the “chamber” part of the equation is admirable, and detailed; here’s what they have to say about it:

1. From an artistic standpoint, we embrace the individual’s contribution to the ensemble, rather than having musical direction occur only from the top down; this is demonstrated by our use of empowered section leaders and our commitment to hold only 5 or 6 rehearsals per concert rotation, as each performer takes ownership over their own musical preparation.
2. From a musical standpoint, we embrace playing with a light touch and tone, fit for smaller spaces; when we play on a large stage, we retain this lighter sound so that all musicians can hear across the orchestra in order to connect with players on different instruments.
3. From a repertoire standpoint, we perform music for 10-40 musicians with a conductor, and also feature some smaller groups at times, performed with no conductor. To facilitate this, we maintain a flexible pool of players in order to supply the changing instrumentation of our concerts.
4. From an organizational standpoint, we entrust the leadership of our group to Board members who are also musicians from within the orchestra.
5. Almost all of the musicians in the TCO also participate in other traditional large orchestras, but we come together under this organization in order to perform music that we can’t do elsewhere. We seek to explore the lesser-known music of our genre in addition to popular favorites, and enjoy the unique demands that only chamber music can provide.

Their season bears that out: mostly symphonies either from the classical era (the 104th of Haydn, the Fifth of Ditters von Ditterdorf–yes, that’s the real name of a real composer) or reflecting to some degree that period’s lighter touch (Schubert’s Fifth, Saint-Saëns’ Second), plus various suites and overtures and sinfonias, plus a string quartet by noted classical chamber composer Philip Glass.

TCO’s “Beauty in Simplicity” concert this weekend at Lakeridge High School Performing Arts Center features the third of Glass’s beautiful string quartets (all of which are pure bliss; this is the one with the music from Mishima) alongside that Haydn symphony and the Sinfonia in C Major by Haydn’s student Marianna Martines.

Tickets and more information on the rest of TCO’s season can be found right here.

***

This has been Part One; read Part Two right here.