Contact: Allison Griffin
Public Relations Associate
503-416-6347
September 21, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Portland, Ore. … The influence of folk sound on classical music is the foundation for the next Oregon Symphony classical concert, featuring mezzo soprano Patricia Risley, on Saturday, October 13 at 7:30 p.m., Sunday, October 14 at 7:30 p.m. and Monday, October 15 at 8 p.m. at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. The concert is generously sponsored by Lufthansa. Media support is provided by The Oregonian, Kink FM and KBPS All Classical.
Risley was named the 2001 ARIA winner, an award that recognizes the careers of exceptionally talented American opera singers. At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, she made her debut as Tebaldo in Don Carlo, followed by Tisbe in La Cenerentola, a role which she just recently sung again with the company, and Mercedes in Carmen. Risley made her performance debut with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1995, and has since performed 11 roles there, including Siébel in Faust, Moglie in the U.S. premiere of Berio's Un Re in Ascolto, Stephano in Roméo et Juliette, Meg Page in Falstaff, and Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby.
Risley will be featured on Luciano Berio’s Folk Songs. The work is a set of folk song arrangements, and is his most frequently performed work. Two of the songs were composed by Berio; he wrote them for his wife, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, who became his muse and primary interpreter of his vocal music. He described his attraction to folk music by saying, “I have a Utopian dream, though I know it cannot be realized: I would like to create a unity between folk music and our music—a real, perceptible, understanding continuity between ancient, popular music-making, which is so close to everyday work, and our music.”
The program concludes with Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat. The ballet is based on Spanish music and folklore. After its premiere in 1919, critics praised Falla for incorporating, “for the first time in Spanish music an essentially Spanish sense of humor,” and a “Spanish outlook on folklore and…music in general.”
The Symphony program also includes the Symphony premiere of Haydn’s Symphony No. 93 in D Major. This piece also has a relation to folk music, as it includes a theme that was eventually placed in hymn books, this becoming a kind of “synthetic” folk music.
Tickets start at $15 and may be purchased at the Oregon Symphony Ticket Office, located at 923 S.W. Washington. Ticket office hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets may also be purchased anytime online at www.OrSymphony.org or charged by phone at (503) 228-1353 or (800) 228-7343, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Discounted tickets for groups of 10 or more are available through the group sales hotline at (503) 416-6380.