Hudson Shad

Appears on: Mahler’s First Symphony

With this concert, Hudson Shad makes their debut with the Oregon Symphony.

Though the six-man ensemble Hudson Shad (five singers and a pianist) debuted officially in 1992, their nucleus formed in 1977 when three of them made their Carnegie Hall debuts as soloists in Penderecki’s Magnificat. In 1989, the Arts at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn asked bass Wilbur Pauley to contract a quartet to perform as The Family in Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins with Marianne Faithfull. The response was favorable.

Over the last quarter century, the Hudson Shad quartet has most likely racked up more performances as The Family in the The Seven Deadly Sins than any other group in history. They have performed in almost 60 different locations, from Arezzo to Zagreb, numbering close to 200 performances worldwide. They participated in a staging of the work, in a double bill with Weill’s The Flight Across the Ocean, at the Macerata Festival. They have twice recorded the work, once with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic and once with Ms. Faithfull, Dennis Russell Davies, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2008, Hudson Shad was honored to participate in the Carnegie Hall premiere of the work with Ute Lemper and the Toronto Symphony.

In 1999 Hudson Shad was featured on Broadway in a musical tribute to the legendary German singing group, The Comedian Harmonists: Band in Berlin

Recent performances include Sins with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2017, in 2018 with the Houston Symphony, and earlier this year with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. In 2018, they sang hymns that Charles Ives used as the basis for his four violin sonatas, in tandem with pianist Jeremy Denk and violinist Stefan Jackiw, in Boston and New York City.

These performances in Portland mark the sixteenth location for the Shad family unit with Storm Large since their initial encounter at the Ojai Festival in June 2014. They appeared previously with Storm and Maestro Kalmar at the Grant Park Festival in Chicago.

Upcoming engagements for Hudson Shad include more Sins in Shanghai and Germany, and a repeat of the Ives program at the Tanglewood Festival this July.