The New York Times’ music critic James Oestreich has written an article today about the Spring for Music Festival, which is presenting the Oregon Symphony and six other orchestras from around the US and Canada starting this evening with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Here’s the excerpt about the Oregon Symphony:
OREGON SYMPHONY
Thursday
Founded: 1896
Music director: Carlos Kalmar
Annual budget: $14 million
Endowment: $10 million
Members: 76The oldest orchestra in this year’s festival, the Portland-based Oregon Symphony is making its Carnegie Hall debut. But it won’t have to wait another 115 years to return.
Like the Albany Symphony it is already scheduled to appear in Spring for Music in 2013. And like the Albany Symphony it has the Civil War on its mind at the moment.
The centerpiece of its program is John Adams’s “Wound-Dresser,” to poetry by Whitman, nestled amid war-haunted or anxiety-tinged works by Ives, Britten and Vaughan Williams. The baritone Sanford Sylvan, who gave the premiere of “The Wound-Dresser” with another festival participant, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, in 1989, will perform it again here.
To engage the community, Thomas Lauderdale, a pianist and the founder of the band Pink Martini and a symphony board member, commissioned a large neon sign for the lobby of the orchestra’s home, the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, to count down the days, hours, minutes and seconds from last May until the Carnegie Hall concert. Only 450 Oregonians are expected to make the trip, but as Elaine Calder, the orchestra’s president, points out, it’s a longer haul from Portland than from Toledo.