Remembering a year of classical music in the Northwest

Gerard Schwarz decided not to seek a contract extension this year, but that didn't stop him from tackling Mahler's 8th Symphony.

With 2008 slipping away in a few days, James Bash and I take turns highlighting the top five classical music performances in Portland and Seattle.

The Best of Seattle
By: Zach Carstensen

Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz: Mahler Symphony No.8
The 2008/2009 Seattle Symphony season will be remembered as the year Gerard Schwarz decided to end his long tenure with the Seattle Symphony and the year Benaroya Hall marked its ten year anniversary.  To begin the season, Schwarz and the orchestra pulled Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” off the shelf.  The 8th had never been performed at Benaroya and only once by the orchestra in their former home at the opera house.  The 8th came just a few months after a successful performance by the orchestra of Mahler’s 6th Symphony.  The 8th’s phalanx of extra musicians and bombastic music are difficult for even the most talented conductors to tame.  Schwarz put all of the pieces together for one of the most memorable SSO  performances of the year.

St. James and St. Mark’s Organists: Messiaen’s Complete Works for Organ
Two of the 20th century’s original, musical voices were born this year – Olivier Messiaen and Elliott Carter.  To recognize the occasion of Messiaen’s birth, organists at St. James and St. Mark’s Cathedral, tackled the composer’s complete works for organ.  Messiaen’s faith is evident in every bar of his organ music.  Setting the cycle in two of Seattle’s most popular cathedrals helped underscore the music’s yearning and reverence.  The cycle was one of very few concerts dedicated to honoring either Carter or Messiaen.

Seattle Chamber Players: Chen Yi’s Choice
The Chamber Players are one of the few groups in Seattle advocating for more contemporary music, not less.  The Chamber Players routinely play composers who are little known or even unknown.  2008 had the group playing music of Feldman at the Seattle Art Museum, Andriessen and Mahler at Town Hall, and music by the next generation of American composers at On The Boards.  Their spring 2008 concert featured a handful of promising Asian composers by the matriarch of Chinese composers – Chen Yi.  The fusion of East and West, insight from many of the composers, and the intimate space at the Chapel made this concert unforgettable.

Jeremy Denk, Charles Ives’s 1st Piano Sonata
Every summer the Seattle Chamber Music Society invites a handful of musicians to play at the annual chamber music festival in Seattle and more recently in Redmond.  The repertoire is mostly predictable.  Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and other household names populate the weekly concerts.  However, the festival’s free recitals reach beyond the standard repertoire.  New York based pianist Jeremy Denk has become the festival’s unofficial Ives specialist.  In years past he has helped listeners understand Ives’s violin sonatas.  This past summer, he navigated Ives less famous, patchwork 1st Piano Sonata and brought a willing, capacity crowd along with him.

Music of Remembrance, Paul Schoenfield’s Ghetto Songs
Paul Schoenfield should be familiar to classical music audiences in Seattle.  Over the years, the Ohio and more recently, Michigan based composer, has been commissioned by Music Of Remembrance to produce two song cycles connected to the Holocaust – Camp Songs and Ghetto Songs.  Last May, MOR premiered Ghetto Songs.  This particular cycle was based on poems written by Mordecai Gebirtig during the Holocaust.  Schoenfield shy’s away from the emotional profundity of his music and the seriousness of its subject.  In fact, the composition is at odds with the composer’s own belief about music.  During a pre-concert talk, the composer nonchalantly explained that his music aspires to be nothing more than entertainment.

The Best of Portland
By: James Bash

Angela Hewitt, JS Bach
The capacity audience at Newmark Theatre was totally engrossed in Angela Hewett’s performance of Bach on April 3. Portland Piano International presented Hewitt in two concerts as part of her World Bach Tour in which she traveled to 40 cities around world to play all 48 Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. I heard the second of the two concerts in which Hewett astounded us with her mezmerzing playing of 24 pieces – all from memory – from Book II.

Oregon Symphony, Mahler’s 9th Symphony
The Oregon Symphony ‘s performance of Mahler’s  9th Symphony on April 29 will stay with me for along time. The orchestra under its music director Carlos Kalmar plumbed the depths of this demanding work with intensity, technical veracity, and artistry, making this concert very emotionally rewarding. I would’ve liked to have heard the orchestra play this piece on each of the three nights that it was presented.

Chamber Music Northwest, Summer Festival
I loved the lively concert shared by the Imani Winds, The Miami String Quartet, clarinetist David Shifrin, and pianist Shai Wosner on July 26 as part of Chamber Music Northwest’s summer festival. The program consisted of Roberto Sierra’s “Concierto de Cámera,” (a newly commissioned work), Leoš Janác(ek’s “Mládí,” and Robert Schumann’s Quintet in E-flat major for piano and strings. Most of the performers were young, and all were totally committed to the music — so much so that I had to purchase recordings afterwards.

Portland Opera, Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Portland Opera’s “Fidelio” was an outstanding production that combined powerful singing by a very strong and talented cast with a fine orchestra conducted by Arthur Fagen and made effective use of a contemporary prison setting.  With Lori Phillips in the title role, Jay Hunter Morris as the wrongly imprisoned husband, Greer Grimsely as the evil prison warden, this opera had plenty of verve to make it relevant

PDQ Bach Plays PDX
The PDQ Bach Plays PDX concert on March 13 will go down as one of my all-time favorite concerts because it was absolutely hilarious and I and my colleagues in the Portland Symphonic Choir got to violate nearly every code of decorum that choirs usually obey. We made a lot of noise every time we stood up, we wore bathrobes, and we fell asleep during the performance. It was a hoot to perform “Oedipus Tex” and “The Seasonings.”

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