Suzi Steffen's blog
Eugene Symphony, City Team Up for Free Concert in the Park
July 18 concert at Cuthbert features new music director — and his wife
An email late this morning alerted me to the best classical news Eugene's had since ... well ... since the Eugene Symphony hired Danail Rachev to be the new music director:
Summer + sponsors + Symphony = free concert at the Cuthbert! The program includes several songs for Rachev's wife, soprano Elizabeth Racheva, and a familiar piece that Symphony Exec Director Paul Winberg said is "traditional for a summer concert," Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Here's Seiji Ozawa conducting the Berlin Philharmonic's summer outdoor 1812 Overture:
Outdoor concerts have been part of the Symphony's long-range planning effort for a while. I wrote about that back in September of 2007. Specifically, I wrote:
[The] presentation includes the idea for outdoor summer concerts; there's a cheer and pumping fists. Outdoor summer concerts are a winner! ("We don't know the venue yet, or how we'd do it, exactly, but we're going to work on it" is the message.)
The Symphony web page looks pretty excited about it too:
Winberg told me this morning that the board and staff had been working on outdoor concerts pretty hard last year but that the city had other things on its plate (you know, the Olympic Trials?). The Symphony secured funding for the free, did I mention FREE? concert last night and sent out the press release this morning, just a teeeeeeny bit too late for us to get it into this week's Summer Guide, but I can't imagine anything more exciting for this city's classical music scene (OK, a series of free outdoor concerts, like those in, ahem, New York, would be superb) this summer than the expansion of accessible classical music.
Winberg and Board President Mary Ann Hansen both mentioned in conversations today that the outdoor, free part was definitely a way to lower barriers that some people experience with other Symphony concerts. "Thursday night can be a barrier, the Hult Center itself can be a barrier," Winberg said. He added that the time of the full-season concerts doesn't necessarily work for families. The summer concert's time is the same, 8 pm, but it's a Saturday night in the summer outdoors with the kids, who can fall asleep on blankets as the concert goes on (yes, yes I did experience this early and often in my young life).
Then there's the price. Or rather, the lack of price. While the Symphony has regular-season tickets for, and I kid you not, FIFTEEN DOLLARS, that's still $15 more than free. Winberg and Hansen both sounded grateful to Ward Insurance for putting together the final piece of the puzzle and being the major sponsor for the event (there are other sponsors, of course; it's not cheap to fly in your music director and his wife from Philadelphia or to pay the musicians for practice and performance time).
I'd add that families can bring picnics or buy food and beverages at the newly revamped Cuthbert, and that helps make it a fun summer outing. Winberg said that he's hoping for around 4,600 people to attend the concert, which seems reasonable given that last fall's music director search concerts "sold out" of free tickets for the 2,500-seat Silva Performance Hall soon after they became available — for concerts at the Hult Center, on various nights of the week, with no kiddie-friendly area nearby.
Combined with the Bach Festival's July 4 concert at the Art and the Vineyard Festival and the splendid Washburne Park concert series, the Symphony's concert in the new, prettier Cuthbert should make July all the more fun.
The full program, copied and pasted from the Symphony's email:
Franz von Suppe Light Cavalry Overture
Dvořák Slavonic Dances, op. 46, no. 8
Mascagni Cavalleria rusticana: Intermezzo
Lehar Meine Lippen Sie Kuessen So Heiss from "Giuditta," featuring Elizabeth Racheva, soprano
Bizet L'Arlesienne Suite No. 2, Pastorale and Farandole
Styne Gypsy Overture
Leroy Anderson Fiddle Faddle
Leroy Anderson The Typewriter
Gershwin "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess, featuring Elizabeth Racheva, soprano
Bock/Harrick "When Did I Fall in Love" from Fiorello, featuring Elizabeth Racheva, soprano
Lerner/Loewe "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady, featuring Elizabeth Racheva, soprano
Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture
Also, if I may just say? SQUEE! Jumping for joy here in the ol' office.
Hey! It's time for the 4J candidate forum at Cesar Chavez elementary school! This is sponsored by Basic Rights Oregon and the Lane Bus Project.
(I am familiar with this library after a few years of SMART here.)
About 45 people here, more coming in. Lots of kids, who are oddly quiet (for now!).
After some finagling with the wireless, I finally got on thanks to a wonderful teacher at Cesar Chavez. This is the 4J School Board candidate forum. Missed the introduction, but I think the candidates are introducing themselves and then taking questions from the crowd.
Seriously: What. The. Fuck.
Media Matters put together this "100 Days of Fair and Balanced" video, made up of clips from FOX — one for every day of Obama's first 100 days.
Couple of serious jaw-droppers in there amid the, er, drumbeat of "fair and balanced":
OK, so we couldn't make it to DC for the White House Easter Egg Roll, but we searched the Interwebs, hunting judiciously, and we dragged this piece of awesomeness back:
Rrrrowr!
Thanks to the tweet (aka Twitter post!) of HeiferPortland, I just watched this video, which I will now share with my many blog readers:
I do not have a backyard and therefore I have no backyard chickens, but we did write about backyard chickens in our really fun Nesting issue (that I still need to blog about *hangs head in embarrassment*). Also, I have three (sometimes four) different sets of friends who at odd, joyous and irregular intervals give us eggs from their magic chickens. Why are chickens magic? Did you watch that video?
Hens can produce up to 200 eggs a year.
And that is why chickens are magic(al).
Also, eggs are part of Passover, which the president and first lady are celebrating with the first-ever White House Seder, not to mention part of that other holiday (non-chicken eggs for that holiday are having a go at each other in the UK). Lots of eggies around at this time of year.
Chickens. Eggs. Anyway, watch the vid, which is from the Heifer Project (rather stupidly not linked at the end of the video, but find the original page here), and maybe send a chicken to a family in a spot where there aren't chicken and duck eggs available everywhere you look, especially if you look at the Farmers' Market portion of the Saturday Market. Nom nom nom.
see more Lolcats and funny pictures
Pantalone (David Kelly) is overjoyed at the prospect of receiving more gold during The Servant of Two Masters at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Photo by Jenny Graham.
Yo, OSF-lovers!
I've been asked to blog this week at Stage Directions Magazine's new online theater community, TheatreFace, about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Oregon theater in general.
If you're a theater person, you might want to join TheatreFace; it's free and, I think especially for designers, hooks you into an international community. You can add photos and have your own blog, join groups and more. If you're interested, join here. (Nope, I'm not getting paid to shill for TheatreFace, though I am getting paid a bit to blog for 'em this week.)
If that's not your thing, however, you can also check out the posts when I repost 'em here this weekend (when the exclusive time on TheatreFace is up).
My first post was a Q&A with Tracy Young, the director of the just-opened Servant of Two Masters. A YouTube clip of Young talking about it is below.
Storm Large rehearses "C.R.A.Z.,"; one of 8 new songs she wrote with Balls band mate and Musical Director James Beaton for her world premiere autobiographical musical, Crazy Enough. Photo by Laura Domela.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted rehearsal photos from Portland Center Stage's one-woman show, Crazy Enough, written by and starring Storm Large.
Here's part of Portland Mercury's Blogtown preview (by Alison Hallett):
Storm told me that the show hasn't changed too dramatically since she debuted it at JAW over the summer, save that David Bowie's people wouldn't give her the rights to "Rock n Roll Suicide." ... I wondered, too, if she'd be encouraged to clean up her pottymouth a bit, but she assured me that there'd been "no censorship" of any kind. (She also mused that there is "something so profoundly gay about musical theater.")
The show opened last weekend, and reviews are starting to come in. From the Oregonian review:
In a show that's part cabaret, part confessional and part comedy, Large delivers the advertised: not only a huge, supple voice but plenty of attitude and dirty disclosures, too. As she takes her audience on her gritty journey, however -- through childhood visits with her mother in a dreary mental institution or a bleary night of broken dreams in the thrall of heroin -- she does much more: She shows what it takes sometimes just to survive.
Whoo!
Locally, there's The Producers still running at ACE, Annie at Cottage Theatre (review coming soon!) and Arcadia at LCC (review coming soon!), but local theater mavens might also want to trek up the corridor to see this 'un.
