Updated: Jun. 21, 2022, 6:32 a.m. | Published: Jun. 21, 2022, 6:30 a.m.
Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia, who perform together as DUO Stephanie & Saar, are the organizers of the annual summer Makrokosmos music festival.Kevin Yatarola
By Brett Campbell | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
When Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia are putting together their annual summer Makrokosmos music festival, it always starts with a single piece. The great American composer George Crumb’s epic “Makrokosmos” cycle inspired the four-concert program — as well as the name — for the first festival in 2015.
This year’s edition sprang from the seed of Havana-born, New York-based composer Manuel Valera’s eventful “Migrant Voyage,” a 10-minute 2015 composition for two pianos that drew inspiration from the struggles of immigrants (especially those crossing the Florida strait) to make it to — and in — America.
When the New York-based couple, who perform classical and contemporary piano music around the country as DUO Stephanie & Saar, heard the premiere, “it really resonated with us,” Ahuvia recalled. Along with the colorful music, the piece’s subject led the pair to build the festival around the theme of immigration and Latin music.
“The American classical sound without Latin music is nothing,” Ahuvia said, citing classic works by Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein. And today, “there are so many amazing Latin composers. It all fell into place.”
A feast for fans of contemporary piano music in the classical tradition, the festival, like the Latino community itself, covers a broad range of styles and sounds. Along with Stephanie & Saar, a bevy of veteran Portland classical musicians from ensembles such as FearNoMusic and 45th Parallel will play contemporary music for flute, violin, percussion, string quartet and more — including plenty of piano.
Musical marathon
Makrokosmos is a lot less formal and more fun than most concerts in the classical tradition — and a lot longer.
“We wanted it to be a big, critical mass of music,” Ahuvia said. “You can always stay for just one piece or one show, but we curate it so can also choose to stay for the entire thing so you can have this immersive experience. You can make the experience what you want it to be.”
That freedom to come and go, take in as much or as little as you please, makes experiencing new and unknown music a lot less risky, especially since wine and snacks are also available between the short sets.
“Between the shows, people are chatting about what’s going on and it becomes this happening, this community thing,” Ahuvia said.
Makrokosmos’s non-traditional venues also make the shows more inviting than a standard classical concert. Ho and Ahuvia had enjoyed the fresh, informal atmosphere of performing in alternative spaces in New York, and accordingly staged their Portland festivals in venues as diverse as a downtown art gallery and the Pearl District lobby of a wind turbine manufacturing company.
This year’s shows at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art offer outdoor food and beverage space (welcome in these virus-plagued days) and the festival’s first East Side location. Most of the performers, however, return from previous festivals, chosen not just for their chops and interest in new music but also because “they’re great players, fiery on stage,” Ho says. “We want [the audience] to have a good time. If they learn something too, great, but the purpose of our festival is to entertain people with wonderful music, and wine and food.”
Latino latitude
Like the Latino community itself, the program is astonishingly diverse, with no common musical elements that characterize the compositions as Latin-influenced except for the names and ethnic heritage of most of the composers. Along with Valera’s jazz-tinged music, the festival offers a trio of avant garde chamber works by another Cuban-American composer, 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner Tania Leon, plus a chirpy flute piece by Alina Izarra, a dramatic four-hand piano epic by frequent Portland visitor Gabriela Lena Frank, a California based composer whose mixed heritage includes Peruvian ancestry, and more.
Two compositions reflect — in music alone, not lyrics — on today’s immigration conflicts. Along with “Migrant Voyage,” Marcos Balter’s brief, shimmering “Dreamcatcher” responds to the human impact of the Trump Administration’s anti-immigrant policies.
Not all the works involve Latino composers. Concerts include the bright, bubbly flute, vocals and electronics of Haitian-American composer Nathalie Joachim, a sizzling violin rhapsody by in-demand New York composer Jessie Montgomery, and the darker, troubled modernist sounds of Korean composer Unsuk Chin.
Nor is Makrokosmos solely a piano-fest. The closing concert offers a break from the piano-dominant programming with longtime regular contributors from Portland Percussion Group and Pyxis String Quartet. The latter plays spacy new music by Inti Figgis-Vizueta, an exciting young New York-based composer of Andean and Irish descent, while the former performs a zingy marimba and electronics quartet by Alejandro Viñao.
The all-piano penultimate performance pays tribute to the festival’s inspiration, George Crumb, who died earlier this year at age 92, with two pieces from his original “Makrokosmos” and the later “Processional,” plus a new tribute composed for the occasion by Oregon composer-pianist Alexander Schwarzkopf. It’s a fitting farewell gesture for a forward-focused festival that also occasionally glances backward — but not too far.
Makrokosmos 8 runs 5-10 p.m. Sunday, June 26, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), 15 N.E. Hancock St.. http://makrokosmosproject.org. $15 advance, $20 day of show, $10 students and seniors.