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| No Bach puns here. |
When Michael Kaiser, the head of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and itinerant national arts consultant without portfolio, was here last year, he said, among many other things, that arts groups needed to program adventurously, take on challenges, play for high stakes. This would tickle their audiences in their ticklish places and give their marketing departments half a chance to attract an audience.
As someone who writes about the arts, that sounded like very good advice to me. Take on something great and maybe they will come. And even if they don't, I, at least, will have an interesting time of it. Oh, we arts writers are a self-centered lot.
Anyway, I saw some serious risks taken this weekend, some major challenges accepted, and it all felt like a great adventure of a certain sort. Third Angle Ensemble gathered its potent percussion forces for Steve Reich's Drumming, Portland Baroque Orchestra summoned vocal reinforcements from here and abroad for Bach's St. John Passion, and Fear No Music played music with and by Gabriel Prokofiev, a young composer attempting to integrate the beats of the contemporary dance hall into his classical compositions, some of which he accompanied as DJ. This was not your granny's trip hop.
I'm following my own chronological course, starting with Third Angle.
