We had a great first concert of the year – the weather was great, if a bit chilly and windy – and there was a terrific turnout at the Oregon Symphony’s neighborhood concert in Arbor Lodge Park in north Portland. I’m horrible at estimating the size of crowds, so I won’t bother – but if you were there leave a comment with how many people you think attended.
I wish that we did a few more of these (as we did in the past) – but city funding has been cut. I wonder if there are other groups that might be willing to come forward with funds to support a few more parks concerts. Adidas has a presence up in north Portland, and a lot of employees that live in the area, maybe they’d like to step up and support the arts in their community (after all, Adidas’ US Headquarters is in Portland).
I was talking with my stand partner about funding for the symphony, particularly a new hall purpose-built for symphonic concerts. I wonder if a bond initiative, combined with library funding and other cultural needs would fly here. Oregon is pretty anti-tax in general, but it makes me wonder – didn’t we pay for the convention center a few years back?
I was somewhat amused by a recent entry in David Stabler’s blog this week, where he put down the number of works being performed by the OSO this season that were written by a still-living composer (as opposed to “living composer”, since all works were written by composers while they were still alive). The number was two. Now, there was nothing else mentioned, so I’m not sure what his point might have been. Was it that we aren’t doing enough contemporary music? That would be a bit odd, since last year he wrote an article which talked about the amount of unconventional repertoire and how it might be hurting attendance figures. Was he praising the conservatism of our programming? That, too, would be odd, since in the last year of James DePreist’s tenure as Music Director, he took JDP to task for not programming enough new or interesting music. Since the blog entry had no accompanying information to go with the statistic quoted, I’m just taking shots in the dark. Maybe something further will follow to enlighten me…
I’m still scratching my head about the Seattle Symphony four concertmaster thing. Can someone who is either in the orchestra or close to it write me and tell me why this is a good idea?