Portland’s spring classical concerts showcase music by women and composers of color

Just as gray winter gives way to spring blossoms, this season’s classical music concerts reveal how much more colorful and diverse Portland classical music concerts have become since the dull days when programs were dominated by a narrow range of music – mostly written in about a 150-year period by long-dead male composers from just a half-dozen or so European nations.

Some spring concerts showcase sounds by performers and composers of color, while others feature works almost entirely written by women or Queer composers. Still others offer music born as long ago as the Middle Ages to as recently as last year, ranging from once-seldom featured places such as Ukraine, Estonia, and America — even Oregon.

Although the state-wide indoor COVID-19 mask mandate has lifted, some venues or artists still have restrictions in place. Check venue websites for information on specific COVID safety requirements.

The dynamic duo of Kev Marcus and Wil Baptiste don’t just bring their Black bodies and virtuosity to classical music stages and instruments, they also infuse classical forms with modern Black musical influences, from hip-hop to soul and their own soulful original compositions, not to mention top-flight drummer, DJ and keyboardist colleagues. They’ve appeared with Wu-Tang Clan, Aerosmith and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, President Obama’s second inauguration, TED Talks, SXSW, and symphony orchestras. They also exhibit a nerdcore charisma that gets their packed audiences — much younger and more diverse than the standard classical crowd — up and cheering.

7:30 p.m. March 26, Keller Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St.; $36-$66, portland5.com or 503-248-4335.

Before becoming known as one of Portland’s finest flutists (with Fear No Music and others) and stalwart new music advocates, Amelia Lukas produced acclaimed multimedia chamber concerts in New York City. Now, impelled by her own Ukrainian heritage, she takes center stage to conceive and perform this solo concert for the brave, beleaguered people of Ukraine, still suffering from Russia’s invasion and continuing attacks and atrocities. Produced in partnership with several local Ukrainian non-profit organizations, the concert features compositions by esteemed American composers Eve Beglarian and Carlos Simon, Portlanders David Bernstein and Lisa Marsh, plus a traditional Ukrainian folk song arrangement, all performed by Lukas on various flutes and electronic instruments. The show also includes live painting by Tatyana Ostapenko, dance by Tiffany Loney, poetry, and videography that explore the concept of home from various perspectives. A portion of proceeds will benefit the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization’s Slavic and Eastern European Center, and Ukrainian Care.

7:30 p.m. April 6; Alberta Rose Theater, 3000 N.E. Alberta St.; $25-$40, albertarosetheatre.com or 503-719-6055.

Part of Detroit’s acclaimed Sphinx Organization, which for a quarter century has been bringing classical music education to demographics long denied it, Catalyst has become a powerhouse vehicle for new music by diverse composers. For its latest Portland visit, which is presented by Chamber Music Northwest, the ensemble offers string quartets by two of the nation’s finest contemporary composers, Grammy winner Joan Tower and Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, a pair of America’s fastest-rising younger generation composers, Angelica Negron and Jessie Montgomery, and 19th and 20th century gems by masters Fanny Mendelssohn and Germaine Tailleferre as well as a lesser-known 1896 quartet by Venezuelan virtuosa Teresa Careño.

4 p.m. April 16, The Old Church Concert Hall, 1422 S.W. 11th Ave.; $10-$62.50, cmnw.org or 503-294-6400.

One of today’s hottest contemporary classical composers isn’t really contemporary — or even alive. Though he was originally acclaimed as one of the leading second-gen minimalist composers and new music performers, when Julius Eastman died alone, not yet 50, in 1990, he was homeless, mentally ill, evicted from his New York apartment, bereft of possessions — including his many original musical scores, many of which took decades of painstaking work by musicians and scholars to reconstruct. Today, amid a spectacular recent revival, much of the music world welcomes a wildly original, ferociously confrontational, Black, Queer composer who wrote some of the most insistently gripping music of his time. Eastman’s hour-long masterpiece, “Femenine,” which has recently received three notable recordings, powers along on an irresistibly relentless riff that gradually erupts into a beautifully expansive sonic journey that ranges from dreamy to driving to delirious and leaves plenty of room for performers to fill in the blanks, which is why it’s a treat to see Portland jazz masters Darrell Grant, Mike Gamble and John Nastos joining violist Kenji Bunch, Bora Yoonand the classical virtuosos of 45th Parallel. The show also includes music by venerated New York avant garde composer Meredith Monk.

7 p.m. April 20; Straub Collaborative, 3333 N.W. Industrial St.; $40, 45thparallel.org or 503-446-4227.

For a quarter century, the Oslo-based vocal ensemble has enchanted audiences like no other all-female classical vocal ensemble since the late, lamented Anonymous 4. And contrary to typical warhorse-heavy classical programs, they do it by pristinely presenting centuries-spanning sounds that almost no one in the audience has ever heard — or even heard of — before. Their characteristically unique program for Friends of Chamber Music accordingly includes medieval English motets, hymns from their Scandinavian and Baltic homelands, and contemporary works written especially for the trio by leading 21st century composers (this time, Sungji Hong and Andrew Smith) — who are as beguiled by their discerning taste and immaculate delivery as their other fans.

7:30 p.m. April 22, St. Philip Neri Church, 2408 S.E. 16th Ave.; $32-$57, focm.org, or 503-224-9842.

This concert should satisfy both fans who revere the grand Romantic classics — here, melody master Franz Schubert’s final completed symphony, his monumental ninth — and today’s sounds. Andy Akiho’s “Beneath Lighted Coffers” features its acclaimed Portland-based composer as featured soloist on the seemingly unlikely steel pan — the instrument he’s revolutionized in recent years, and plays as mellifluously as a concert harp. Akiho’s just the latest American composer to create music inspired by his study in Rome — but his 2017 composition incorporates ratios, time signatures, and other musical notions derived from the architecture of the mighty Pantheon itself: the portico’s Corinthian granite columns, panels embedded in the soaring dome, the patterned marble floor, the skies visible through the oculus.

7:30 p.m. April 29 and May 1, and 2 p.m. April 30, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 S.W. Broadway; $25-$129, orsymphony.org or 503-228-1353.

Tuba players generally lurk in an orchestra’s background, but the Oregon Symphony’s JáTtik Clark is such a vivid virtuoso of his ungainly instrument that he’s offered spotlights not only with his home orchestra but also others. Clark stars in leading American composer Michael Daugherty’s eventful 2015 tuba concerto “Reflections on the Mississippi,” which retains the colorful fun of his famed orchestral portraits of Superman, Liberace, and other American icons, but also summons depths and cross-currents arising from its composition in the wake of his father’s death, memories of family vacations along the river, and associated sources like the works of William Faulkner and Mark Twain, second line rhythms of New Orleans, and the mighty river’s own moods and motion. The program also includes Modest Mussorgsky’s ever-popular evocation of a painter’s gallery, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” and John Williams’s (yes, that John Williams) short, spirited “Devil’s Dance,” from his film score to “The Witches of Eastwick.”

7:30 p.m. May 5; First United Methodist Church, 1838 S.W. Jefferson St., Portland; and 3 p.m. May 7, Gresham High School Auditorium, 1200 N. Main St., Gresham; $30-$50, pcsymphony.org or 503-234-4077.

‘Come to the Woods’ — Oregon Repertory Singers

Choral music fans asking who will succeed Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen as the next-gen superstar American choral composer may find their answer at Oregon Repertory Singers’ May concert, featuring the music of Jake Runestad. Still safely under 40, the Minnesota-based composer has been racking up accolades and awards (including an Emmy) for more than a decade, and this easy-on-the-ears program shows why, with music ranging from sincere and soaring (“Let My Love Be Heard”), to ethereal (“And So I Go On”), to sheer, crowd-pleasing fun (“Nyon Nyon”), and beyond. The program also features classics by Mozart, Bruckner and Mahler.

4 p.m. May 13-14; First United Methodist Church, 1838 S.W. Jefferson St.; $25-$45, orsingers.org or 503-230-0652.

“Considering Matthew Shepard” — Portland State University Chamber Choir

In the quarter-century since young, gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was kidnapped, bludgeoned, left tied to a fence and died, homophobic violence continues — and so do responses, political, artistic, musical. One of the most prominent is Conspirare choir director and composer Craig Hella Johnson’s 2016 full-length oratorio (work for voices and chamber ensemble) “Considering Matthew Shepard,” which sets to music words by Rumi, medieval German abbess, composer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, Lesléa Newman, and Michael Dennis Browne, alongside passages from Shepard’s journal, interviews and writings from his parents Judy and Dennis Shepard, newspaper reports and more. PSU’s international award-winning chamber choir presents the Portland premiere.

7:30 p.m. May 19 and 4 p.m. May 21; First United Methodist Church, 1838 S.W. Jefferson St.; $20, portlandstate.universitytickets.com or 503-725-3307.

“1000 Airplanes on the Roof” — Third Angle New Music

The alien abduction insanities (or are they?) related in composer Philip Glass and playwright David Henry Hwang’s multimedia “science fiction music drama” may seem quaint in these days of deadly right-wing conspiracies allegedly involving infant blood-quaffing pedophiles. But the perennial “what is reality” questions its unreliable narrator, M, poses have only grown more urgent since its 1988 premiere in a Viennese airport hangar. The single actor (Ithica Tell) grows increasingly unhinged as she recounts her harrowing journey from rural to urban life, through romantic and psychological upheaval, alien encounters and back. Whether it all “really” happened becomes less important than what such tales tell us about the skewed society that spawned them. A sextet of Third Angle musicians plays Glass’s pulsating sextet score, for synthesizers, woodwinds and Arwen Myers’ wordless vocals. And the striking setting — under the giant tail of Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose airliner folly — suits the strangeness of the material.

8 p.m. May 20-21, Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, 500 N.E. Captain Michael King Smith Way, McMinnville; $25-$60, thirdangle.org or 503-331-0301.