Portland Columbia Symphony gives Shakespeare the full treatment

by James Bash on November 23, 2009

One of the coolest things about the Portland Columbia Symphony Orchestra concert at First United Methodist Church on Friday evening (November 20) was the connections between texts by Shakespeare and the music they inspired. This concert featured actors Christy Bigelow and Josh Fuhrer, who recited fragments from Shakespeare’s plays. The texts matched up well with the music on the program, which included works by Carl Maria von Weber, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Giuseppe Verdi, and Edward Elgar. As an additional treat, soprano Coral Walterman sang two arias from Verdi’s Otello.

The concert began with Bigelow and Fuhrer portraying an animated discussion from A Midsummer Night’s Dream between Oberon, the king of the fairies, and his wife, Titania. Then the orchestra took over with a lively performance of the overture to Oberon, an opera that Weber wrote to help secure some income for his family before he died of consumption at the age of 38 in 1826.

The distant and languid sound of the horns and woodwinds helped to create a dreamy atmosphere. The strings added a feathery touch that captured the fleeting essence of fairies. Under the baton of music director and conductor Huw Edwards, the orchestra also showed off some fine crescendos and decrescendos that made this piece a rousing opener for the concert.

As a prelude to Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music, the actors recited some of the most poetic lines from The Merchant of Venice. The words (beginning with “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank”) are usually sung by a choir, but in this orchestral version much of that melody is given to the concertmaster. Dawn Carter, the PCSO’s concertmaster played the lyric passages with a breath of sweetness. The orchestra, as a whole, maintained the lush quality of this work although the intonation here and there was suspect.

For Verdi’s Otello, Bigelow and Fuhrer gave a snippet of the dialog between Iago and Otello. Their dialog nicely framed the scene for guest artist Coral Walterman, who sang two of Desdemona’s arias (Salce, salce and the Ave Maria), with great feeling. The program should have had the words to these arias printed and translated so that the audience could follow along.

After intermission, came a saucy dialogue between Falstaff and Mistress Doll that set the scene for the orchestra’s performance of Elgar’s Falstaff. This symphonic work covered a lot of ground and girth in six episodic segments. The orchestra convincingly created a variety of moods that ranged from serendipitous and jaunty (when Falstaff and Prince Hal start out as friends) to lethargic (when Falstaff falls asleep at a tavern) to majestic (when Hal is crowned as king) and finally as disappointment (Falstaff is turned away by the king and forgotten).

Overall, it was really interesting to experience the connections between literature and music. I would think that this kind of concert would play well in Ashland, because of the astute audiences at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. All the world is a stage. Play on!

James Bash

James Bash writes articles for a variety of publications, including magazines such as Opera America, Open Spaces, Opera, MUSO, International Arts Manager, American Record Guide, Symphony, Opera Canada, and PSU Magazine. The newspapers include Crosscut, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Oregonian, The Columbian, The Portland Tribune, The Register-Guard, and Willamette Week. James has also written a number of articles for the Oregon Arts Commission. James was a fellow to the 2008 NEA Journalism Institute for Classical Music and Opera. He is a member of the Music Critics Association of North America (mcana.org) and lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, Kathy.