bending genres or just producing good art?

Last night the Oregon Symphony performed a concert with Rufus Wainwright as the opening salvo of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s (PICA) 2010 Festival of Time-Based Art.  When our first rehearsal with Rufus was approaching, I really had no idea what to expect.  Would this be one of those uncomfortable collaborations where the orchestra is just elaborate window dressing that lends the headliner some upscale cred?  Gratefully, the answer was an emphatic NO!

Photo: Leah Nash/PICA Press Corps.

This three-way collaboration between PICA, the OSO, and Wainwright was the brainchild of Pink Martini frontman (and OSA board member) Thomas Lauderdale, who heard excerpts of Wainwright’s opera Prima Donna from a recording of the premiere in Manchester in the summer of 2009.  And so the first half of the evening was dedicated to excerpts from the opera, featuring two overtures and two major arias featuring two of the female characters (out of four in total), The Maid, sung by Portland’s Megan Hart, and The Prima Donna, sung by the Scottish soprano Janis Kelly.  This put the Oregon Symphony front and center, and really was a gracious move on the part of Wainwright.  He could have just cranked out a bunch of standards from his catalog, but instead we got to hear a serious and major operatic work, and one which I very much hope will be presented in its entirety in Portland (the sections performed last night were the US premieres of music from the opera).

The second half of the evening was more conventional in scope, showcasing Wainwright’s singing with the orchestra, and involving several collaborative numbers with Portland’s own Storm Large and Thomas Lauderdale, and rejoined by soprano Janis Kelly, most movingly in Leonard Cohen’s anthem Hallelujah, where each singer took a verse, building to a very satisfying conclusion.

I very much liked how everything was presented.  It wasn’t a “symphony” concert, and it wasn’t a “pops” concert, and it certainly wasn’t your typical concert of “pop” music.  Instead, it was a melange of everything – the best of everything, really, and it was an evening where the audience wasn’t talked down to, or pandered to, or even warned against the fact that there would be some 21st century opera performed.  Instead, it was simply an evening of great music, brilliantly performed, and warmly accepted by the near-capacity audience.  To me this is the future of music – all music, not just classical.  And it’s a future that I look forward to very much.