Press

On December 19, 45^th Parallel Universe put on a four-venue Pub Crawl along Mississippi Avenue in North Portland. Clarinetist, Mendelssohn’s owner, and one-who-does-a-bit-of-everything-music-related Lisa Lipton organized the event, and mere hours later a press release went out announcing her as the new Executive Director for 45^th Parallel.

One of today’s hottest contemporary classical composers isn’t really contemporary — or even alive. Though he was originally acclaimed as one of the leading second-gen minimalist composers and new music performers, when Julius Eastman died alone, not yet 50, in 1990, he was homeless, mentally ill, evicted from his New York apartment, bereft of possessions — including his many original musical scores, many of which took decades of painstaking work by musicians and scholars to reconstruct.

45^th Parallel Universe founder and virtuoso violinist Greg Ewer is bringing a gaggle of early music specialists and their historical instruments to The Old Madeleine Church in Northeast Portland for an evening of Baroque music by Composers Besides Bach: a bit of Handel and Vivaldi, plus music by Anna Bon, Jean-Pierre Guignon, Antonio Caldera, and Jean-Marie Leclair.

ArtsWatch’s series “Catching Up With” asks the long-running local music groups: how the hell have you been doing? …how have you gotten through the last Year of Weirdness? …and what’s next? For our second installment we spoke to three furloughed Oregon Symphony musicians who over the last year put on live-streamed concerts nearly every week.

It’s such a weird thrill going to Oregon Symphony concerts, looking down into the string section with its fifty-odd neatly seated performers, and seeing 45^th Parallel Universe Executive Director Ron Blessinger, buried in the violins, attentively warming up his bow with the rest of the office.

Black Angels… a monstrosity of deconstructed chants and songs and drones and noises and large helpings of frankly gorgeous music, all of it performed, on this rainy night, by an ensemble comprised of Portland’s best string quartet (there, we’ve admitted it) making sounds on a wide variety of instruments, some of which include strings.

Hearing a piece of music played in total darkness is a truly singular experience. From sounds like a car engine revving to a subway car screeching, sirens, a machine and music similar to “Psycho,” the thrilling, transfixing performance of George Frederich Haas’ String Quartet No. 3 performed by the Pyxis String Quartet at the Liberty Theatre on June 21 was exceptional.

A concert is never about only the music. Otherwise we’d just listen to a recording on headphones. At Pyxis Quartet’s Feb 15 concert at Portland’s Old Church, which on that rainy evening felt like the most consequential performance I’ve attended in Portland, the music offered some splendid moments.