Here’s a great article by David Brewster about the much-respected and financially secure Chamber Music Northwest from the online journal Crosscut. Here’s the opening:
 If Seattle is a bright beacon flashing out its grandness, Portland is a bushel basket, under which well-kept secrets gleam. My favorite example is Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest summer festival, now in its 37th year and one of the finest in the country. My family has been going for the past 25 years, but I rarely encounter a music lover in Seattle who’s ever been. CMNW, doing just fine, thank you, shows no inclination or need to market to a Seattle audience.
7 replies on “under the radar”
Thanks for the link. I’d be interested in comments about one of my points, namely that there should be more exchanges between cities such as Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver, especially when they have arts groups as fine as CMNW. It used to be tough, due to sibling rivalries. Have we grown up enough now? And what else would be worth exporting?
I totally agree. One item that has continually come up in discussions – particularly amongst the musicians in the OSO – is that we really need to be heard regionally to bolster our prestige and presence in the region. The most often cited solution is to do a concert at Benaroya Hall in Seattle, but we have not been invited to play at that venue, and the cost to do it self-produced is too prohibitive right now.
I don’t know if groups which are so close in proximity and size can really impinge on each others’ turf, no matter how good the relationships between their artistic and management staff. The consumer pie is so segmented now that it is hard to risk sharing even a tiny bit of it with a brother or sister organization. I’d go further and say that it’s hardly necessary, when the major chamber music festivals on the west coast of the US share about 80 percent of their artists from the same pool of the highest level players (and many of those are the same musicians who started their careers at CMNW).
Back in the 70s and early 80s Seattle Opera and Portland Opera did do an exchange. They would alternate the years. One year Seattle would bring one of its productions (scenery, costumes, soloists, and conductor) to Portland, and the following year Portland would bring one of its to Seattle. I’m guessing that this arrangement broke down when Seattle Opera’s coffers began to grow substantially past Portland’s and no longer had a need to keep the arrangement going.
In regards to chamber music, I love CMNW and other series that bring nationally known artists to the Northwest, but it would be great to see a new kind of series that would use some of our regional talent. The level of music making in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver is very high.
I do recall those Opera exchanges. There were also efforts at Ballet, and there ought to be a symphony swap once a year. Maybe the best way to get this going is to focus on smaller venues and more cutting edge work. Town Hall Seattle is a good place, with two halls of 250 and 850 seats. Portland badly needs an equivalent space, with eclectic programming. Capella Romana, a wonderful Portland group, will be performing in Town Hall next season. Can Pink Martini be far behind???
I agree with your Town Hall suggestion for Portland. We do have Kaul Auditorium at Reed College, which can seat over 600 and has very good acoustics. But Reed, of course, books Kaul for its college event through fall-winter-spring, and that leaves a limited amount of dates open for the other groups that would like to use it. Now that Portland Center Stage has its own place in the Armory, the Newmark Theatre is open. But that venue does not work for many groups for a variety of reasons, including the size of the stage, no orchestra pit for more than a handful of players, dry acoustics, and terrible sightlines from the upper balcony. I have not heard of any plans by Portland State to build a new concert hall, but that would be a place to start.
There have been a lot of dropped balls concerning a concert hall of this size. I agree that it is the most sorely needed hall in town – even above a new concert hall for the symphony (which should be no larger than 2000 seats, btw). It’s a shame that there couldn’t be some public/private financing of such a space – like the Petronas towers in Kuala Lampur, where the state orchestra’s hall was built at the base of the structure – such as down at The Strand development at the southern edge of the downtown waterfront, or at a similar development at the north end of the pearl district, or in the bensen tower over by PSU. Lots of opportunities to provide huge tax breaks in exchange for a public concert hall of 800 – 1000 seats, and it was on no one’s radar at all.
Kaul is ok – just ok. The bleacher seating is noisy and just screams “multipurpose hall”. I’m not wild about the acoustics – I’d still rather see quartets in Lincoln Hall, if that can be taken with a straight face (but it’s true!), or at Catlin Gabel. An example of a gem of a hall of around this size is Hudson Hall at Willamette University, it’s something that PSU should build and then lease out to all of the major arts groups in town for musical events.
I like your suggestion for a Hudson Hall-like concert venue at PSU. I would like to help to lobby for this. It could be a terrific answer to a lot of frustrated arts organizations in Portland.
One other idea in connection with this kind of all. Perhaps there’s a way to have condos or apartments on the floors above the hall and maybe a little bit of regular-flavored commercial space on the street level. That mixed-use kind of thing might help to pay for the building.