This is the third part of a discussion with impresario and composer Bob Priest about March Music Moderne IV.
So what is coming up for the festival this Friday?
—James Bash, Northwest Reverb (read the full article)
Category Archives: Press
Explosive, scorching music coming with March Music Moderne
And who better than Maria Choban to rouse us from our winter doldrums? Choban is the Joan Jett of Portland’s classical music scene: aggressive, passionate, uncompromising.
—David Stabler, The Oregonian (read the full article)
Weekend MusicWatch: Moderne Times
Chief provocateur Bob Priest deserves enormous credit for creating a space for today’s music — so criminally ignored by most of our classical music institutions most of the time — that he and others have stuffed with a wide range of performances in a startling variety of venues.
—Brett Campbell, Oregon ArtsWatch (read the full article)
Metal Machine Music/Kogut Butoh 3/8
This event is one of those reasons that while we might all get self-satirical about living in Portland, it really is a place where creativity bleeds out of the walls. Could there be a more surreal or appropriate blending of media than setting a Butoh dance performance to Lou Reed’s finest and most difficult recorded work?
—Ricardo Wang, KPSU (read the full article)
March Music Moderne returns with more musical merriment and mayhem
In like a lion, out like a lamb, they say, but for a while this March, Portland will sound like something altogether outside the natural realm — a chimera, a griffin, maybe even a jackalope. Welcome to March Music Moderne, the rite of spring celebrating the eternal renewal of ideas in sound.
—James McQuillen, The Oregonian (read the full article)
Hear Beethoven’s Ninth stretched out over 24 hours in ‘9 Beet Stretch’
Odds are, you’ve heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — or at very least part of it — but have you ever heard the masterpiece stretched out over 24 hours?
—Jamie Hale, The Oregonian (read the full article)
Bob Priest talks about MMM IV — part 2 of interview
This is the second installment of an interview with Bob Priest about the fourth annual March Music Moderne Festival. This part of the discussion covers the first few days of the second week of the Festival.
—James Bash, Northwest Reverb (read the full article)
Music for moderns
Part of the March Music Moderne IV festival, “Retro-Moderne” will focus on new works for woodwinds, including “Shout Chorus” by Portland composer Kenji Bunch.
“This is a highly demanding, virtuosic work that pushes the instruments to the extreme,” Bunch says, “but one that was written in the spirit of the infectious dance rhythms, humor and joy of American big-band jazz of the 1940s.”
—Rob Cullivan, The Portland Tribune (read the full article)
March Music Moderne: Classical Revolution PDX
With marriage equality finally on its way to long-overdue reality throughout the rest of the civilized world, Classical Revolution PDX celebrates music by gay composers, including works by Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Eve Beglarian and Peter Maxwell Davies—all of whom also just happen to be among the finest of the 20th century, regardless of orientation.
Brett Campbell, Willamette Week (read the full article)
Béla Bartók’s String Quartet: Quatuor Ébène
Coming on the heels of the PDX Jazz Festival, March Music Moderne provides a wonderful modernist counterpoint to its more august cousin. The schedule for the fourth annual festival, organized by local musician and composer Bob Priest, looks to be a stunning one, including this rare Portland appearance by Quatuor Ébène.
—The Portland Mercury (read the full article)