Astoria Music Festival

Published 5:00 pm Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Beginning Friday, June 14 and continuing for the next two weeks, the Astoria Music Festival celebrates the bicentennial of two great composers of the Romantic era, both born in 1813, with performances of their greatest operas. Saturday evening, June 15 will see a concert of music from Wagners Ring of the Nibelung, including the first Oregon presentation of Die Walküre in 30 years. Highlights from Verdis great Otello will be presented the following Saturday, June 22. For good measure the final weekend (June 28 and 29) will see a fully staged production of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, the iconic 20th century opera that almost caused a riot when it was first performed in 1913. There wont be a riot this year, though: Whos going to be upset by an opera that costs only $15?

And theres more. Oregon state Sen. Betsy Johnson is scheduled to narrate Coplands A Lincoln Portrait; there will be concerts for children, cantatas, coffee and croissants for adults, chamber music and tangos at the Performing Arts Center. In short, there will be something for everyone.

The festival will bring together a host of performers known to stages throughout the world, including festival favorites Sergey Antonov, who is an International Tchaikovsky Competition gold medal winner for the cello; Juliana Gondek, who has performed with more than 150 orchestras and opera companies; acclaimed pianist Cary Lewis; Richard Zeller, one of the worlds finest Verdi baritones; and one of the greatest sopranos America has produced, Ruth Ann Swenson.

Despite the international repertoire and stars, the festival begins at the Clatsop Community College Performing Arts Center on Friday evening, June 14, with, appropriately enough, Astoria on Stage. The program features homegrown musicians: North Coast Symphonic Band, North Coast Chorale, String of Pearls Big Band, fisherpoets and, we are promised, much, much more. The lineup of locals is appropriate because this is a homegrown music festival.

When I moved to Portland, explains Maestro Keith Clark, the festivals artistic director, conductor and co-founder, I took a drive to the coast and was captivated by Astoria, which is a remarkable place. Clark met some local people and was introduced to the Liberty Theater, before the restoration started in 2000. It looked bad, he says, but it sounded great. Not only was he moved by the acoustics, I was moved by the fact that there were people massing their energies to preserve something as historic as the Liberty Theater. That doesnt happen every day.

One thing led to another, and in 2003 the Astoria Music Festival was born. This year, as always, the 11th Astoria Music Festival is made possible by scores of local volunteers, from the board of directors to the ushers, all coordinated from a small office on Commercial Street.

The festival uses this small office intensively for only a few months of the year, but the rent has to be paid every month, and the festival is a low-budget operation. How were organizers going to avoid the expense of a year-round office? The creative solution was Tempo Gallery, a cooperative of local artists who now share the space year-round. At the time of the festival, the gallery sponsors a music-related exhibit. This years exhibit features work by Normandie Hand, Yvonne Edwards and Marga Stanley, who says of her paintings, I did them specifically to celebrate the music festival and its marriage with the gallery.

The festival and community support each other not only with art and music, but with dance as well. In the festivals last week, students from the Astoria School of Ballet will dance in Purcells Dido and Aeneas, sung in English at the CCC PAC. The Little Ballet Theatre, another group of local dancers, will join the modern Agnieszka Laska Dancers of Portland in the performance of The Rite of Spring at the Liberty Theater.

Community support is essential to the success of the Astoria Music Festival in another way as well. Housing all the musicians is another huge expense or would be but for the 40 homestay hosts who invite 95 musicians and staff into their homes anywhere from three to 14 days. They invite strangers into their homes and leave on very good terms with each other, says Celia Tippit, who coordinates the homestay program, I think its remarkable.

Hotels and other lodging also reduce rates for festival participants. The Riverwalk Inn even donated three rooms for 18 days. An incredible gift, says Tippit, Its really very, very kind. Its not just hotels and the well-to-do that help out. There is an egalitarian feeling about it, says Tippit. Its across the board. A student gave up her apartment for a weekend. Its people who care about music.

Commerce and art help each other out at festival time. If you ever doubted that art plays an increasingly important role in the Astoria economy, try to book a room in Astoria during the three weekends of the festival, or go out to eat and notice how crowded the restaurants are. You might also ask anyone you see in town wearing what former festival board member Dulcye Taylor calls a Viking hat one of those helmets with the horns growing out of either side, like Wagnerian sopranos wear.

I saw all the Scandinavian Festival people wearing those Viking hats, says Taylor, now president of the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association (ADHDA), and then the music festival was putting on Wagner, and I had this crazy idea, and the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association bought 80 hats. If we run out, people can buy them from Finn Ware. Members of the ADHDA decorated the helmets to suit their particular business. The idea, says Taylor, is that well be walking the streets wearing these hats, and people will come up and say, what the hell is up with those hats? And well tell them about the (Midsummer) Scandinavian Festival and the (Astoria) Music Festival. We support the festivals, and they support us.

As I tried to direct a group photograph of Viking hat-wearing members of the ADHDA and their friends and relations, a couple walked up to Taylor and asked what the hats were for. She told them, and turned to me: See? It works!

The major festival concerts draw slightly more than half the audience from Portland and beyond (the mid-week events draw primarily locals), and the apprentices musicians who are just beginning their careers come from as far away as New Zealand, but the festival remains a homegrown affair. Astoria adds its idiosyncratic flavor to the worlds great music and the star performers of that music, and the result is a festival to be proud of.