OBF wins Portland Music Award

February 1, 2011

At the fourth annual Portland Music Awards Friday, January 28th, the Oregon Bach Festival took home the award for Outstanding Achievement in Classical Music. John Evans, OBF executive director and president, accepted the award from actor Daniel Baldwin.

“This is a great city for music and the arts,” said Evans, on the stage of the packed Crystal Ballroom, “and we were honored to have been shortlisted for this prestigious award, alongside such distinguished colleagues.  And it’s all the more gratifying, given that the Bach Festival, despite its forty-year history on the international scene, has only established itself in the Portland market in the past three years. I think it’s safe to say that we’re here to stay!”

Other nominees in the classical music category were the Third Angle New Music Ensemble; Carlos Kalmar, conductor of the Oregon Symphony; the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; and Chamber Music Northwest.

After a gap of three decades, the University of Oregon’s cultural event returned to Portland in 2008 with a sold out performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass.

From June 27-July 9, 2011 it stages a mini-festival that includes concerts by the Portland Baroque Orchestra, the Schola Cantorum choir of Venezeula, its Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy, a recital on the famous Rosales organ of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, conducted by Helmuth Rilling, OBF’s founding artistic director.

Originated to celebrate the diversity of music on the Portland scene, the Portland Music Awards listed 22 categories representing artists from the worlds of rock, R & B, world, country, classical, and more.