George Evano says Oregon Bach Festival will celebrate its 40th …
Helmuth Rilling – George Evano
This summer, from June 25th through July 11th, the Oregon Bach Festival will celebrate its 40th year with performances and educational opportunities that have made this Festival one of the nation’s best. Co-founded by artistic director, Helmuth Rilling in 1970, the Oregon Bach Festival will include big names like Thomas Quasthoff, Bobby McFerrin, Monica Huggett, Pink Martini, Robert Levin, Anton Armstrong, and Jeffrey Kahane in its mix of concerts and events.
To tell us some of the highlights, I stopped in Eugene to talk with George Evano, the Festival’s longtime director of communications. Here is our conversation:
How long have you been working with the Oregon Bach Festival?
Evano: This is my 18th season. My first year was 1993 which was just before the OBF’s 25th anniversary. There were a lot of events and people to take into consideration in the planning for the celebration – all of the history, the tradition, Helmuth Rilling. I came to Eugene with a background in theater, but not in classical music. I was completely overwhelmed when I started. So 1994 was a big milestone for the festival then, and now we are up to 40. Just going through the albums and programs, trying to recall the greatest hits of the festival is a chore! I’ve got a lot of information in my head – I guess I’ve become the footlocker of the festival!
What are the big performances for the festival this year?
Evano: Helmuth’s concerts at the beginning and at the end of the festival are like two pillars that help define the festival. So the festival has its big start with the Verdi Requiem on the 25th in Eugene and on the 27th in Portland. Verdi isn’t like Bach, but we’ve done the Verdi Requim a few times before, most recently in 1994 and in 2000. Helmuth loves that music. The power of the orchestra and chorus give him a channel to communicate the marriage of text with music.
Mendelssohn’s Elijah with Thomas Quasthoff is the other pillar concert that marks the end of the festival. That concert will be performed in Portland on July 9th and in Eugene on the 11th. Mendelssohn is closer to the Bach tradition than Verdi, especially when you consider that Mendelssohn is credited with the rediscovery of Bach’s music. The music is very powerful, and it will be great to have Quasthoff in the role of Elijah.
Are the Festival’s performances in Portland a new thing?
Evano: We performed Bach’s Mass in B Minor in 2008 in Portland at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. That was the first time in 30 years that we had been in Portland, and it was very successful. So, this is our third straight year in Portland, and we are building a following there with at least couple performances each year.
Even as successful as the Oregon Bach Festival has been over the years, it has been largely a Eugene-based festival. One of the missions of John Evans, our executive director and president, is to make the festival more fully a state-wide festival, and truly live up to the name of Oregon Bach Festival.
Also, it’s difficult to get people to drive from Portland to Eugene. The two-hour drive is too close for an overnight stay. It might take a few years to get firmly established in Portland. We have to have the right programming and the right people to help influencing things to make an ally for our cause.
What else is Helmuth conducting?
Evano: Helmuth will lead the B Minor Mass as part of our Discovery Series. This features the conducting students who have been working under Helmuth with smaller ensembles. Helmuth begins the concert with a lecture on the piece. The student conductors get the baton; so it’s like the final exam of a master class for them. This concert and lecture series takes place in four separate concerts, and it’s almost sold out.
Helmuth is also conducting the 40th Anniversary Gala Concert on July 3rd in Eugene. That concert will have all of the stars of the festival involved. It’ll have choral selections, Bobby McFerrin and the youth choir, Quasthoff will sing some Bach arias with trumpeter Guy Few, the finale from Mendelssohn’s Octet, Poulenc piano concerto, a Robert Levin edition of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, a little bit of the B Minor Mass and Brahm’s Requiem, a multi-media slide show plus some short videos, Quasthoff will do a couple of jazz numbers, and the finale will be the Beethoven Chorale Fantasy!
Wow! That’s a lot of music!
Evano: It going to fabulous!
A lot of people are excited about Quasthoff coming back to the Festival.
Evano: Right. Quasthoff made his United States debut here in 1995, and he’s become an international star. The recent reviews about his performance at Carnegie Hall in the New York Times and the Financial Times were absolute raves. ‘Quasthoff is at the top of his form! There’s nothing that he can do wrong. Everything that man sings is superb!’ There is something in the way that Quasthoff can put more meaning into every word that he sings. It’s really great that we can get him here for these performances, because he’s in demand everywhere.
You’ve to Monica Huggett and the Portland Baroque Orchestra scheduled again.
Evano: Yes, they are helping us to establish a period-instrument component to the festival. They will play the Bach Orchestral Suites in a reconstructed form by oboist Gonzalo Ruiz. We are sponsoring their concert – with the same program in Bend. That’s part of our quest to expand our reach beyond Eugene.
And we have Jeffrey Kahane, Robert Levin and his wife Ya-Fei Chuang, plus Anton Armstrong and the choral programs for youth. It’s a pretty good mix of things.
Choral music is our specialty; so it’s a good place to focus in terms of growing a younger audience. Most of our donors are older and well-educated, but the audience at the performances have a great mix of ages.
This year we will have a high school teacher’s choral workshop in conjunction with the youth choral academy. We hope that when the teachers return to their schools they will communicate their enthusiasm for the festival to their kids.
The Tiempo Libre Dance Concert is also a way to show a connection between Bach and Latin music. The Tiempo Libre ensemble has been nominated twice for Grammys and featured on Dancing with the Stars, but they’re here because of their latest record, “Bach in Havana,” which fuses Bach melodies with sizzling Cuban rhythms. Their performance will take place at the Hilton Hotel on July 10th.
Sounds great! Good luck with this big celebration!
Evano: Thanks!