Good men must plan: A review of ‘Journeys to Justice’
Angela Allen
April 27, 2021
In 30 years of covering Portland Opera, Angela Allen writes, “I’ve never seen such a compelling program.”
In 30 years of covering Portland Opera, Angela Allen writes, “I’ve never seen such a compelling program.”
ArtsWatch Weekly: Ready or not, things are opening. Plus Lillian Pitt & Friends, opera breaks out, poetry time.
Though each of the six pieces is contemporary — written in the late 20th and early 21st centuries — Geter chose somewhat established works as well as freshly minted ones…
ArtsWatch Weekly: Remembering Beverly Cleary, Larry McMurtry, and composer Stephen Scott; revolutions & the way things change.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Where’s Frida; how to (maybe) reopen; farewell to Ross McKeen; puppets, comics, and more.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Tumbling toward Inauguration; Carrie Mae Weems’ billboard campaign; Zoomy theater.
Portland Opera’s virtual recitals from Martin Bakari and Vanessa Isiguen dig into the heart and soul of the music.
Cut to December: It didn’t get less weird. Seeing the music and larger worlds from our almost front-row seats.
Portland Opera’s free online recital series “Live From the Hampton Opera Center” goes contemporary.
With so many performances going online, our news roundup follows suit with video and audio from Oregon musicians for your home streaming enjoyment
Amid difficult times, the Portland opera singer Onry raises his voice for inclusion.
ArtsWatch Weekly: Planning for post-Covid culture; pancakes & the art of dissent; good things come in multiples.
Portland Opera’s ex-chief: Precarious arts funding, “small is better” ethos imperil the city’s major arts groups.
Shut down by the pandemic, the Portland Art Museum puts 80 percent of its staff on unpaid leave.
“An American Quartet” of short comic operas? Yes, indeed, thank you very much.
Matthew Neil Andrews spots composers everywhere, and a jazz festival, too.
A look back at the ups and downs and curious side trips of the year in Oregon culture.
• Portland Opera has named Sue Dixon the company’s sixth general director, replacing Christopher Mattaliano, who departed in June after 16 years. She’s served the company in other capacities since 2014. PO also temporarily assigned Mattaliano’s artistic direction responsibilities to Palm Beach
Portland Book Fest turns the page, downtown gets a new museum, and it’s beginning to feel a lot like … already?
Portland Opera’s “Butterfly” has melody, familiarity, and style. But does it surprise?
As the contemporary arts festival surges onto an already bulging calendar, that is the question.
The opera abandons summers and returns to a fall-spring season. PSU’s new museum taps a proven leader.
“I was really on fire”: PHAME Academy and Portland Opera collaborate on original rock opera.
Glass’s music makes a perfect match to Kafka’s provocative story in Portland Opera’s potent production .
Allow me to get personal for a moment. You, my dear readers, know that I’m involved in this vibrant local music scene I’ve been writing about every week for the last three years. As a student at Portland State University, I walk
Philip Glass never expected In the Penal Colony to be a success. “When I wrote it, I thought, it’ll get done once and then no one will ever do it again,” Glass said. “Why would you want to watch a suicide? Basically
La Finta GiardinieraJuly 12-27, Newmark TheaterIn The Penal ColonyJuly 26-August 10, Hampton Opera Center It’s oddly appropriate that Portland Opera is closing its season with summer performances of Mozart and Philip Glass. Both composers are that rare breed: equally adept at performing
Caution: Radioactive glowing disk has returned to Oregon’s skies! Remember your sunscreen! Remember your sunscreen! Message repeats. Five weeks and one day There’s an old zen saying: you should meditate 20 minutes every day unless you’re too busy, in which case you
Story by ANGELA ALLEN Photos by JOE CANTRELL The obscure La Finta Giardiniera (The Fake Gardener) is making its modern-day debut twice in Portland in four months. The opera is Portland State University’s spring presentation (the final show is at 3 pm
Photographs by JOE CANTRELL Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 18 years old when his opera La Finta Giardiniera (The Pretend, or Fake, Gardener) debuted at the Salvatortheater in Munich in 1775. When it opens Friday evening at Lincoln Performance Hall in Portland it’ll
Oregonians today are lucky to be able to hear live performances of music from several centuries, not just the narrow 150 year swath of Central European music that once dominated classical concerts. This week’s concert schedule includes music from the Renaissance, Baroque,
by MATTHEW ANDREWS Portland Opera’s As One is, on one hand, about one type of transgender experience (there are many); on the other hand, it’s not really about being transgender, any more than the Barber of Seville is about being a barber.
When Kimberly Reed was growing up in Helena, Montana, “it was hard to be an opera fan,” she remembers. There were no major opera companies around, but she did have one portal to opera. “My father listened to the Metropolitan Opera every
As 21st century America belatedly recognizes that gender isn’t always a binary phenomenon, artists have increasingly illuminated its fluid, spectral reality, as Oregonians have seen in recent Time Based Art Festival performances, last fall’s Contralto show by Third Angle, and more. Now
Last year’s music roundup first looked homeward. ArtsWatch’s 2017 music coverage focused, as we have from the outset, on our state’s creative culture: music conceived and composed in Oregon. We touched a lot of other bases, too of course, and homegrown music
by BRUCE BROWNE It is 1840s Paris and the population is booming. Just outside the gaslight’s glow, the new urban lady of the evening offers her talents. She is a courtesan and her life will become a fascination in the literary, visual
It’s probably too late for the next generations to save our planet from the greed and selfishness of their elders, but at least they’ll have music to console them. Young musicians, like young Americans in general, do give me what little hope
Portland Opera opens its season with Verdi’s Bohemian Parisian perennial La Traviata, which runs this Friday night and Sunday afternoon, and next Thursday and Saturday at Portland’s Keller Auditorium. Romanian soprano Aurelia Florian, tenor Jonathan Boyd and Weston Hurt star in this
By DAVID MACLAINE The system finally caught up with us, right when we were getting comfortable. “Sorry, no seats in that section,” the helpful fellow at Portland’s Newmark Theatre box office told me. The moment we had finally gotten over our anxiety
“I used to voice a tentative I’d like; now it is a firm I want.” This statement, told to me by Anne-Marie Plass during a conversation about the challenges of living with developmental or intellectual disabilities, registered deeply. The difference in wording
by ANGELA ALLEN More often than not, he plays the villains (Méphistophélès in Faust) and the weirdos (Bluebeard in Bluebeard’s Castle). She portrays the vulnerable tragic heroines (Violetta, Mimi, Marguerite). Certainly those aren’t the only roles rising opera stars Alfred Walker and
The annual summer slowdown in Oregon’s live music season gives us a chance to catch up on some recent news. Do check out other events this week we’ve already previewed elsewhere, including a pair of vintage shows: an encore of a Aquilon
by BRUCE BROWNE and DARYL BROWNE I’ll admit, I’ve been negligent about my concert attendance of late. My reasoning, I suppose, is that I needed a good long rest. But now having roused myself to attentiveness I have heard that I perhaps
With its glorious melodies , menacing harmonies, and inclusion of music for dances that actually drive the plot rather than functioning as interludes giving singers a chance to catch their breath, Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 opera Orfeo ed Eurydice has inspired some
Every summer, The Shedd’s Oregon Festival of American Music approaches its two-week series of concerts, films, talks and more from different angles, but the Eugene festival’s perennial subject — American pop music from the 1920s to just before the rise of rock
Portland’s summer music scene would feel incomplete without Portland SummerFest Opera in the Park, the annual free, family friendly opera performance in Washington Park Amphitheater, with the audience arrayed on their blankets gazing down at singers and orchestra on the amphitheater stage.
When Portland Opera switched to a summer season last year, one stated reason was to avoid competition with other similar events. But operas and their American-born cousins, stage musicals, seem to be proliferating this summer. There’s no glass slipper or fairy godmother,
While the temperature in downtown Portland was inching toward 100 degrees on Sunday afternoon something cool was happening in the Newmark Theatre, and it wasn’t just the air-conditioning. Portland Opera was kicking into the second performance of its current run of Gioachino
Andy Akiho’s previous Chamber Music Northwest appearances with percussionist pal Ian Rosenbaum revealed both performance virtuosity — on the 39-year-old New Yorker’s unlikely instrument, the steel pan — and also a distinctive and appealing compositional imagination. In one of the summer festival’s
A squadron of saxophone sorcerers descends on Oregon’s music scene this week, many combining jazz with classical influences. British saxman and MC Soweto Kinch has been blending jazz, funk, hip hop and poetry in original ways for years, garnering a passel of
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