Chamber
Music Northwest: Music
of Poulenc, Lutoslawski and Dvorák
Reed
College,
Kaul Auditorium, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 294-6400.
8 pm Thursday, July 20. $16-$29.
Catlin Gabel
School, 8825 SW Barnes Road,
294-6400. 8 pm Friday, July 21. $16-$29.
Beethoven
Sonatas for Violin and Piano
Reed College,
Kaul Auditorium, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd., 294-6400.
8 pm Saturday, July 22. $16-$29.
Chamber Music Northwest, the annual summer festival that
brings some of the world's hottest chamber-music specialists
to Portland, is arguably the city's biggest claim to classical-music
fame. This year the perennial favorite burns 30 candles.
Clarinetist David Shifrin has been on hand for 23 of those
years, for the last two decades as artistic director.
WW checked in with Shifrin to assess where CMNW's at,
why it's here and where it's going.
Willamette Week: Back in 1980, when you became
artistic director, did you imagine you'd be doing this for
20 years?
David Shifrin: I don't know if I thought so with any certainty,
but I certainly hoped so. It's a very special place and
organization-- exactly what I wanted to be doing with the
music. I feel we've grown together--become more sophisticated
and grown in audience numbers, appreciation and knowledge.
Working with Linda (Magee), who's been executive director
one year longer than I have artistic director, has been
so productive in terms of what we've succeeded in doing.
Why Portland?
There's something about the art form of chamber music and
the size of the city that fits. It's a major city but manageable.
It's not the largest city but if you look at the percentage
of people who support the arts, Portland is certainly up
there. Chicago, New York, Los Angeles can support large
groups, symphonies, operas. With chamber music you have
the best shot at excellence with the resources at hand--world-class
musicians in concerts of two, four or 18, like the recent
Roaring Twenties show. So it's scalable, portable
and flexible, and you don't have to compromise the quality
of playing.
Explain CMNW's connection with the Chamber Music Society
of Lincoln Center, where you're also artistic director.
There's a lot of cooperation between the two. We share
artists by design. In the upcoming Copland Sextet performance,
exactly the same group will perform the work at the upcoming
Ravinia Festival in Chicago under the Lincoln Center name.
Our three-concert "Encore Series" here in Portland presents
programs in total cooperation with Lincoln Center so that
in our off-season we can still afford to present shows.
On the Lincoln Center West Coast tours, the musicians have
an opportunity to play to audiences here that know them.
So our February 2001 premiere of the Edgar Meyer Trio will
be a stop in between San Francisco and L.A. We can piggy-back
on the efforts of the larger Lincoln Center. This works
for co-commissions as well, like the works by Bruce Adolphe,
Yehudi Wyner and Edgar Meyer this year. Musicians who play
the work in New York I'll invite here to perform the same
work in a really beautiful city for an appreciative audience.
All that travel must kill you. You teach at Yale as
well?
The jetlag doesn't get any easier. But as musicians we're
so motivated to be doing what we're doing that it's just
a way of life. Pianist David Finckel came from New Zealand
and his wife Wu Han from Israel to be here. Bassoonist Milan
Turkovic came from Vienna. So I have it easy by comparison.
For awhile, Portland becomes the center of our musical universe.
There's been so much talk about the death of classical
music and recruiting new audiences.
I don't think it's dying. You can look at audiences in
2001 in any given community and the average age is, say,
50. If you checked 20 years ago, the average age was the
same. Why isn't it 70? As people age, I think they appreciate
and look for music of greater quality, depth and significance
and realize what a wealth there is in chamber music. Now
if the average age increases from year to year, that's something
we should pay attention to. We're addressing that in different
ways. At Lincoln Center we had a recent success with the
Orion String Quartet playing the complete string quartets
of Beethoven in six concerts. As a gift to the city of New
York, we gave away all tickets and had an honoree for each
concert--Harlem School for the Arts, Opus 118, Brooklyn's
Mind Builder. Audience members could donate to each organization
at the performance. But the tickets were free and when they
went "on sale" there was a line around the block. We gave
away 6,000 tickets in six hours!
The best thing was that this wasn't your average Lincoln
Center audience. But you could hear a pin drop as we played.
When we finished, the applause was like at a rock concert.
This was an important lesson for us to keep in mind for
the future.
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