Reimagining classical music - and how we gather around it
Emily Isaacson senses a lot of pent-up excitement among her circle of peers. People are ready to start socializing again, safely.
“The carnival concert and community celebration embodies what the Portland Bach Experience is all about, which is bringing classical music to unexpected places and pairing it with unexpected things,” she said. “We are using music to bring the community together again and to highlight what this community is all about.”
Read More“Music has the power to heal because it taps into our shared human experiences and emotions, something we desperately need right now,” said Isaacson, founder and artistic director. “For fifteen long months, we have hibernated, alone and silent. As we emerge from the pandemic, live performances will make us feel alive again by bringing us together and celebrating the endless capacity found in the human spirit. We want everyone to have access to that incredible experience, so we’ve designed the festival with something for everyone – free, family-friendly events, virtual concerts, indoor performances and outdoor musical experiences.”
Read MoreThank you for A.Z. Madonna’s recent story about the Boston Early Music Festival (Sunday Arts, June 6) and for highlighting the challenges arts organizations continue to face as we try to “reconstruct” after the past year. I can sympathize with the difficult decisions it took to bring BEMF virtual this year. Last June, the classical music festival in Maine that I founded was forced to cancel.
Once the immediate crisis passed and we learned more about the coronavirus, I was driven to create a live festival this year so that we could offer our talented artists a paycheck. This meant initially creating a program for masked string players, with outdoor and virtual performances. When vaccination rates increased and restrictions decreased, we pivoted to include more venues and musicians. Thanks to overwhelming support, the festival was a huge success, with 90 percent of our events sold out and many free events at standing room only.
I ask that everyone who misses live performances consider the impact this year has had on the artists, particularly freelance musicians, and support organizations that employ them. Whether it’s watching performances virtually, attending in-person events, or providing a donation, your support will provide the parachute the arts need to land safely this year.
Read More“It’s all about flexibility, connecting,” Isaacson says. “Reconfiguring, re-imagining, opening, a real touch sense… Inclusivity. … An expansive sense of what is expression—all of that I think is in Brad’s work (Roomful of Teeth) and mine.”
Read MoreAfter a hiatus last year because of the pandemic, Portland Bach Experience returns in June for 10 days of classical music events and a dozen live and virtual concerts from Portland, Sanford and Brunswick.
The festival kicks off on June 11 with a free, carnival-style concert and community celebration, called A Midsummer Night’s Dream, involving more than 25 local arts organizations, eateries and other creative enterprises.
The festival will be held on Anderson Street from 3 to 8 p.m. with performances by musicians from the Portland Bach Experience, Ballet Bloom Project, 240 Strings, Shoestring Theater, A Company of Girls, Love Lab Studios and others. Food and drink will be supplied by Blue Lobster Urban Winery, Goodfire Brewing Company, Eighteen Twenty Wines, Lone Pine Brewing and Urban Farm Fermentory.
Read MoreAfter the Black Lives Matter protests last year, Emily Isaacson, artistic director of Classical Uprising, and internationally known countertenor Reginald Mobley wanted to find a music program that would promote healing and “create a safe space for dialogue,” she said…Amazing Grace: The American Spiritual,” a multimedia concert traces the history of African-American spirituals from Pre-Emancipation to the present day, would create that space. The concert features Mobley, Jonathan Woody, Samuel James, JanaeSound, and the Oratorio Chorale, along with visual art by Portland’s Daniel Minter and historical commentary by Judith Casselberry, an associate professor of Africana studies at Bowdoin College. “In a year as tense and fraught with division as the last one, I believe music can offer a non-threatening space for dialogue around difficult conversations,” she said.
Read More“My art is all about breaking down barriers,” says Emily Isaacson, artistic director and conductor of both the Oratorio Chorale and Portland Bach Experience (PBE)..”For 200 years, this music has pretty much been confined to the same structures and settings,” says Isaacson. “I stepped back and asked how else can we build the experience—to make it easy and natural for more people to enjoy.” With energy and imagination, Isaacson has pushed those doors wide open to musical vistas that enrich the culture in Maine…Isaacson launched the nonprofit, barrier-breaking Portland Bach Experience, which sets early music performed by world-class players in unexpected environments like public parks, the Promenade, breweries and even the Bayside Bowl.
Read MoreAs artistic director of the Portland Bach Experience, Isaacson has found unconventional ways to present music, including spacing performers on different levels at Bayside Bowl. She rejects the “doomsday social media” prediction that live music is dead, which followed Tuesday’s news.
She also believes the news impacts more than singing groups, including any art form where people are close together “using and expunging breath – wind and brass instruments, maybe even black-box theater.”
Read MoreEmily Isaacson envisions something similar to Spoleto in Charleston, S.C. Now she's trying to get others to help make it happen.
Read MoreThe piece was deeply moving. This reporter has been reviewing the work of the Oratorio Chorale for more than 15 years, and would have to say that this concert represented the best of the Oratorio Chorale. The soloists were supremely gifted; the period musicians were excellent; the choir was in the best form I have ever heard them. As director Emily Isaacson moves out of her comfort zone into more and more challenging work, it is gratifying to watch her chorale move with her joyfully and masterfully. She trusts them to perform under pressure, and they never seem to falter. - Gina Hamilton, Wiscasset Newspaper
Read More“I resist the sterile way in which we experience classical music in the twentieth and twenty-first century. I want to return classical music to its natural habitat, which is social and weaved in to people’s everyday life,” Isaacson says. Another goal of the festival is to draw people to Portland who will boost the local economy. “Entrepreneurship is a core part of the Maine spirit, and it’s in the arts, too,” she says. “You just need to work really hard and have a great idea.”
Read MoreEmily Isaacson, director of the Oratorio Chorale and founder of the Portland Bach Experience, received the Artist of the Year award from the Maine Arts Commission, the state-funded agency that supervises all the arts agencies in the state of Maine
Read More
Gift article
Share
Emily Isaacson, director of the Oratorio Chorale and founder of the Portland Bach Experience, is artist of the year in the first Maine Art Awards. Staff file photo by Carl D. Walsh
Artists and arts administrators across Maine came together in Portland on Friday to celebrate their accomplishments and recognize their leaders as part of the first Maine Arts Awards. The midday awards ceremony at Hannaford Hall at the University of Southern Maine was the centerpiece of the two-day Maine International Conference on the Arts, presented by the Maine Arts Commission. Emily Isaacson, director of the Oratorio Chorale and founder of the Portland Bach Experience, received the artist of the year award.
Read MoreIsaacson brought together the large forces of the Oratorio Chorale, at full strength, and an expert chamber orchestra of players from the rosters of the Portland Symphony Orchestra and other groups. The choir was at the top of its game here. Without exception, its singing was solid, tight and texturally transparent, and whether Handel demanded vigor or introspection, the choir delivered it with admirable precision. And the orchestra, though playing modern instruments, produced a tight, focused sound that had the incisive edge of a period instrument group.
Read MoreDr. Emily Isaacson is prone to outbursts of great enthusiasm and episodes of thoughtful pause in equal measure as she discusses her time spent conducting. Gesticulating for emphasis, she leans forward and says fervently, “part of my mission has been to tear down what I see as unnecessary restrictions to incredible music.”
Read More"I got access to these musicians that were like in another stratosphere of creativity. Because I had this solo, and because the piece was quite complex, I had a number of private coaching sessions with June Hahn (harpist) and Jeff Milarsky (conductor). I have such vivid memories of....working together, and feeling like I was part of art in a way I had never experienced before, that I was part of something transformative for myself, and also expressive of something so much greater than the three people in this room and the little town of Brunswick.
Read MoreCan you imagine listening to Bach in a bowling alley? What about in a beer hall with raucous people sitting around you?
Listening to Bach outside the traditional concert hall environment is what the Portland (Maine) Bach Festival is all about, and while it might not be for everyone, it's attracting new people to classical music.
Festival Co-founder Emily Issacson says it’s about establishing connections between the old and new
Read MoreWhen people come into Bayside Bowl, they will receive a menu. One side lists the food and beverages that are available, and the other side offers a menu of musical options. “You can watch Brandenburg Concerto #3 from the second-floor balcony, hear a double choir motet performed from opposite lanes or watch the sunset from the rooftop deck as you enjoy the Double Violin Concerto,” Isaacson said.
Read MoreMaine-based Oratorio Chorale will accompany a world-renowned countertenor in a concert production called “Amazing Grace: The American Spiritual.” The multimedia performances are designed to convey how the music helps to tell the story of the nation itself.
Isaacson says she wants audiences to experience the connection between the music and how it has been shaped by changes in American society and religion.
Small towns are really good at building community and supporting each other.
But they can be a tough place to grow up for kids with niche interests that they want to pursue at a high level.
Emily Isaacson, the music director of Brunswick's Oratorio Chorale, is seeking to change that for teens who are into classical singing.
Read More
