Classical Notes

Tardis Ensemble
Tardis Ensemble

Eugene Symphony brings a trio of top singers to join its chorus for the Thursday, March 20, performance of Haydn’s great oratorio, The Creation, at the Hult. After one of the most famous opening scenes in music — nothing less than what we’d now call the Big Bang — the great classical composer doesn’t need no stinkin’ sets or theatrical props, using only his most colorful music to paint scenic portraits of the events and even animals described in the Christian creation myth.

On March 21 at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, we go from Puccini’s view of the American West to musical views of the American South. The Tardis Ensemble plays the great 20th-century African-American composer William Grant Still’s gorgeous 1960 Lyric Quartet, Brooke Joyce’s 2006 Sorrow Songs, which incorporates recorded voices of former slaves, and music by contemporary African-American composers Frederick Tillis and Valerie Coleman (from Imani Winds). After the concert (part of the museum’s exhibition Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power), UO musicology instructor Larry Wayte facilitates a discussion of race, identity and the experience of African-American composers in Western classical music.

World music fans can catch the fine Portland sitar player Josh Feinberg with Eugene tabla master Josh Humphrey on March 23 at Tsunami Books.