Orchestra
shines light on 'Darkness'
The Portland Chamber Orchestra begins with a compelling opera, ends with
a bolt of lightning
Monday, October 16, 2006
Instead of "From Darkness to Light," the Portland Chamber Orchestra should have called its concert, which traveled from a somber opera to a mad-hatter's clarinet party, "From Darkness to Delirium."
Portland Chamber Orchestra
turns 60 this year, making it one of the country's older chamber ensembles.
Like the Columbia Symphony, which also marked a milestone this weekend, both
groups use freelance musicians in programs that range far beyond the mainstream.
For example, few of us would know of Viktor Ullmann's opera, "The Emperor
of Atlantis," were it not for Saturday's concert by the Portland Chamber
Orchestra. Ullmann, a Czech composer who studied with Arnold Schoenberg, wrote
his one-act parable about oppression while a prisoner at Terezin, the concentration
camp near Prague. It came to light in Amsterdam in 1975, one of the first
works to re-establish the reputations of Jewish composers who had been Nazi
victims.
"Atlantis" isn't
compelling drama, but the ear and the heart didn't stray for long because
the piece comes freighted with so much history. Soon after a dress rehearsal
at the camp, Ullmann and much of the cast were deported to Auschwitz, where
Ullmann died in 1944. The
story portrays a dictator whose policies infuriate even Death, who objects
by going on strike and denying his comforting touch to the terminally sick.
By the end, the dictator relents and Death returns to his job.
But despite Ullmann's references to the music of Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler
and Kurt Weill, "Atlantis" really engaged me only in its closing
moments. The finale urged us not to "rage, rage against the dying of
the light," as Dylan Thomas put it, but to accept death so that we might
prize life more fully. Words and voices merged in gentle harmony.
Six singers from Seattle's Black Box Opera Theater, all in excellent voice, performed a succession of opulent arias in Kaul Auditorium, with active support from music director Yaacov Bergman and the orchestra.
Then came lightning, in
the form of clarinetist David Krakauer, who premiered Israeli composer Ofer
Ben-Amots' fabulous "Klezmer Concerto." Krakauer, who shot to international
acclaim following his best-selling CD "The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac
the Blind" by Oswaldo Golijov, didn't just play the clarinet. He threw
his head back and unleashed a torrent of notes -- more like yelps, yips, barks
and brawls -- but always within a musical context. He's the Paganini of the
clarinet.
Add Krakauer's amazing gift for circular breathing and the result was a delirious
delight.
-- David Stabler, The Oregonian
