interesting idea for pdx?

The Seattle Chamber Players presented their fourth Icebreaker Festival of contemporary classical music this past weekend in Seattle. Present was current classical music writer/rockstar Alex Ross, who curated a concert of works by seven young New York composers who’d caught his ear (including five premieres).  Also the SCP presented, in association with the Seattle Art Museum, a marathon three and a half hour concert of the music of iconoclast Morton Feldman (1926-1987).

Read the details here.

I’d love to see something like this here in Portland, especially if all the major and minor ensembles collaborated on stuff all over town. Pick a particularly fecund year – say 1908 – and have Chamber Music Northwest, Friends of Chamber Music, Third Angle, fEARnoMUSIC, the Oregon Symphony, Portland Opera all present works from that year, with lectures by leading scholars from Portland State, Reed, Lewis and Clark, Willamette. Get some high-profile stars to headline, and package it all up right, and you could have a destination event much like the epic Tristan Project. It would take a few years of planning on an epic scale, and there would be no doubt epic risks to share as well, but it could really put Portland on the classical music map big time.