Listen to this: An evening with Alex Ross

Acclaimed author and music writer Alex Ross joins the virtuosos of 45^th Parallel for an evening of words and music, a unique concert experience that will entertain, edify, enlighten, and exhilarate! Alex will read from his books and essays, providing compelling context to the music that 45^th Parallel then performs. This is a co-production with the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts and will be recorded for broadcast on All Classical Portland.

Program
The program features Alex reading from his three best-selling books and New Yorker essays, with the musicians of 45th Parallel performing the following works:

Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland 45th Parallel Chamber OrchestraBagatelles by Gyorgy Ligeti Arcturus Quintet

The Wind in High Places by John Luther Adams Pyxis String Quartet

Pyramid Song and Creep by Radiohead, arranged by Sergio Carreno Gemini Percussion and guest vocalist Bora Yoon

Five Folk Songs in Counterpoint by Florence Price mousai REMIX String Quartet

“Wo in Bergen du dich birgst” aria from Walküre, by Richard Wagner Mezzo soprano Hannah Penn, pianist Maria Garcia

Special guest performers include composer/vocalist Bora Yoon, mezzo-soprano Hannah Penn, and pianist Maria Garcia.

Alex Ross has been the music critic at The New Yorker since 1996. He writes about classical music, covering the field from the Metropolitan Opera to the contemporary avant-garde, and has also contributed essays on literature, history, the visual arts, film, and ecology. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,” a cultural history of music since 1900, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His second book, the essay collection “Listen to This,” won an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music,” an account of Wagner’s vast cultural impact. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Bora Yoon, vocalist
Bora Yoon is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at Reed College. A Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist, Bora’s musical practice focuses on the intersection of classical forms of music and hybrid expressions of time-based new music and evolving technologies. Classically trained in voice, violin, and piano — her research and teaching interests include Music Composition, Electroacoustic Music, Songwriting, Sound Art, Embodied Performance, Music for Dance, Film, and Theater, Spatial Audio, and Immersive Performance with New Media. Her music has been featured in
the Wall Street Journal, WIRE magazine, Apple TV+’s Pachinko,
NPR, TED, and the National Endowment for the Arts podcast. She joins the Reed faculty in 2023.

Hannah Penn, mezzo-soprano
Hannah Penn, mezzo-soprano, enjoys a diverse career as a performer of opera, oratorio, and recital literature. Frequently praised for her musicality and the timbre of her voice, Ms. Penn has recently been called “…a major talent”, and “…and intelligent and wonderfully musical singer” by Portland’s Willamette Week, and was praised for having “…intriguing colors at both ends of her range” by the Oregonian. She has sung more than twenty operatic roles with Glimmerglass Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Portland Opera, Tacoma Opera, and other companies.

Maria Garcia, pianist
Maria began piano studies in her native Puerto Rico at the age of four. At the age of ten she made her debut with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. She received a Bachelor’s of Music with Distinction in Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Graduate studies followed at SUNY Stony Brook where she received a full merit scholarship and completed a Master’s Degree in Music as well as Doctoral Studies. Her principal teachers have been Luz M. Hutchinson, Victor Rosenbaum and Gilbert Kalish.

45th Parallel Universe
45th Parallel Universe is a collective of Portland-based musicians who collaborate to create new classical chamber music experiences for audiences in Oregon and throughout the world, embracing tradition even as we challenge its conventions. For over a decade, the collective has served as a creative outlet for the city’s finest musicians seeking to explore and deliver world-class chamber music using innovative musical formats, artistic partnerships, and unconventional performance venues. 45th Parallel Universe—composed primarily of Oregon Symphony Orchestra musicians–has happily demolished distinctions between old and new chamber music, bluegrass and jazz, fiddle and folk since 2009.

Arts For All tickets are available. Location and quantities may vary.
Please contact the box office for more information. Email boxoffice@thereser.org or Phone (971) 501-7722.