It is a sign of our maturity as an arts city that in a week’s time, Portland will host an avant-garde chamber music concert at an alternative arts venue, an early-music festival in a long-established church, and a pair of orchestra concerts featuring music by a leading contemporary composer in the city’s most prestigious concert hall.

It’s hard to discern exactly what we are witnessing, as we are in its midst, but it’s probably accurate to say the city is changing, evolving and growing up. We are participants in vibrant cultural times.

What we’re talking about specifically:

• On Thursday, Space Gallery on Congress Street collaborates with the Portland Chamber Music Festival to present the piece “Next Atlantis,” written by the highly touted contemporary composer Sebastian Currier and videographer Pawel Wojtasik.

Complete with pre-recorded audio tracks and video, the piece reflects on the power of water to both heal and destroy. It is loosely based on post-Katrina New Orleans.

•  Friday through Sunday, the Portland Conservatory of Music hosts its second annual Portland Early Music Festival at the Woodfords church. It features centuries-old music performed on ancient instruments and their replicas.

Last year’s festival was a bit of a risk. Portland is a smallish city to host such a specialized festival. These early-music events are popular in major metro areas like New York and Boston.

But the inaugural festival did well, and organizer and performer Timothy Burris is bringing it back.

•  The Portland Symphony Orchestra presents two concerts — on Sunday afternoon and Tuesday evening — to open its season at Merrill Auditorium.

A signature piece at both performances will be Mason Bates’ “Mothership,” commissioned by the YouTube Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. It involves an electronic element. Laptops run certain sounds that marry with symphonic sounds. It’s cutting edge and risky.

All of these events represent bold programming decisions.

SPACE CHAMBER

The Thursday chamber music concert at Space may be the most exciting. The idea of putting classical music in a club setting is pretty cool, and a great way to expose chamber music to a wider, non-traditional audience.

It also presents Space with an opportunity to draw a different crowd into its downtown gallery, which hosts a variety of visual and performing arts events, but rarely classical music.

“People have been telling us for years that we should talk to Space,” said Jennifer Elowitch, the Portland Chamber Music Festival’s artistic director and co-founder. “I wasn’t in the Space Gallery crowd, but I kept hearing good things about it.”

Elowitch set up a meeting with Space executive director Nat May and events programmer Nick Rosenblum. She expected they would give her information about renting the gallery for the night.

Instead, they told her they wanted to take part as presenters. “They wanted to be a part of it,” Elowitch said. “They wanted to be in on this plan. I would like to see this turn into a long-term collaboration and maybe some kind of series.”

The evening will feature three pieces, including the trendy multi-media collaboration for string quartet with pre-recorded sound and video.

Currier, the composer, is a big name in some circles. He won the Grawemeyer Award, given to leading composers. It’s one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary music, with a prize of $100,000.

Currier was resident composer at the Portland Chamber Music Festival this summer. He pitched this piece to Elowitch at that time.

She was interested, but daunted. It requires a lot of electronics and multi-media collaborators, and Elowitch isn’t technically savvy. She plays the violin; she doesn’t do electronics.

But she was interested enough to pursue it further. Based on everything she heard around town, she thought Space would be the perfect fit for this piece.

Contemporary music is a sore spot for some classical music fans. People want to hear the classics. Elowitch understands that, but feels strongly that contemporary music must be given a place alongside the classics.

There is no better place for that sort of experimentation than Space, which is used to hosting non-traditional events.

“I feel strongly that if we are going to make chamber music and classical music viable in the future, we have to keep it moving forward,” Elowitch said. “There is a lot more bad contemporary music out there than there is bad classical and romantic music, because the other periods have had time to sift out the bad stuff. Our job is to play contemporary music so history can sift it out.”

Currier and his video collaborator will be in Portland for the performance. Space will open at 6:30 p.m. for a cocktail hour, and the music will begin at 7:30 p.m. There will be conversation between the performers, creators and the audience afterward.

“Have a drink, sit down and enjoy the concert,” Elowitch said. “It promises to be very casual and fun.”

REALLY EARLY MUSIC

At the other end of the spectrum is the Portland Early Music Festival. It features music by Haydn, Bach, Purcell and others who lived mostly in the 1600s and 1700s.

This is Old World music performed by a range of contemporary performers from Maine and elsewhere. They play lutes, fortepiano, harpsichord and other specialized instruments that were common during the time the music was written but are less common today. These are highly specialized instruments and highly trained performers.

Burris, who lives locally, has performed widely in Europe and across the United States. He has made nine recordings of 18th-century works, and taught lute at the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Music in Antwerp. He teaches at Colby College in Waterville and at the Portland Conservatory of Music.

When he helped launch the festival a year ago, Burris went into it with an open mind. He hoped it would do well, but did not hold unreasonable expectations. If few people showed up, he might not have been shocked.

Instead, all the concerts were at near capacity.

Woodfords Congregational Church, home of the Portland Conservatory of Music, offers favorable acoustics. Burris hopes that people who show up will listen for the distinctive sounds of the instruments. There is a clarity of tone to the fortepiano or lute that is unlike modern instruments, he said.

“It’s like you are listening to different music,” Burris said. “You will be hearing music that may be familiar, but played in a way that may not. You may have heard this music before, but not like this.

“The word that most often comes to my mind is transparency. The music becomes more transparent than when it is performed on modern instruments. I believe we better understand the clarity of the composer’s intent.”

The festival begins at 7:30 p.m. Friday. That concert, featuring Sylvia Berry on an 1806 fortepiano, is titled “Haydn in London.” Berry specializes in Viennese music of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Maine-based tenor Timothy Neill Johnson will sing.

There is another concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14. Each performance will include an educational component, and the afternoons will be filled with master classes.

NEW SEASON FOR PSO

And finally, we have the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Music director Robert Moody has programmed a season-opening concert steeped in tradition, with works by Aaron Copland and Tchaikovsky as well as Mason Bates.

The latter may not be a household name, but he’s becoming one.

“Mothership” is the third Bates piece that Moody has programmed for the PSO. The composer is, as Moody says, “at the top of his game” right now, and Moody feels fortunate that Bates is still interested in working with the orchestra.

With its modern technology and unlikely musical forms, “Mothership” may not sit well with some PSO loyalists. It’s not familiar, and the idea of laptops generating sounds may offend some sensibilities.

But these are modern times, and Moody embraces a continuum in music that allows room for the new and experimental as well as the old and traditional.

It’s fun to bear witness to change.

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or

bkeyes@pressherald.com

Twitter: pphbkeyes

 

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