Music lovers get a Handel on festival's opening act

By Fred Crafts of The Register-Guard

Bach may be back, but it was George Frideric Handel who dominated the Oregon Bach Festival's opening Friday night.

Maestro Helmuth Rilling guided the festival orchestra and chorus through Handel's rarely performed 1751 oratorio "Jephtha," to launch the festival's 34th season.

The 17-day music festival's wide-ranging concerts and lectures are expected to draw some 35,000 patrons from more than 30 states and five countries.

Rilling, the festival's founding artistic director, comes each summer from his home in Stuttgart, Germany, to conduct and teach in Eugene. 

With "Jephtha" behind him, Rilling will now turn his attention to rehearsals for a July 6 concert pairing Johannes Brahms' "A German Requiem" with Alban Berg's Violin Concerto (featuring soloist Alyssa Park), and then to the festival's July 13 closing concert, centered on Bach's Magnificat and W.A. Mozart's Mass in C Minor.

Besides conducting high-profile concerts, Rilling will be occupied with teaching a master class for conductors, lecturing at "Discovery" concerts led by the emerging conductors and conducting a work to be sung by the festival's Youth Choral Academy.

Another artist getting plenty of attention is charismatic California pianist Jeffrey Kahane, who will undertake a unique virtuosic feat: playing all five of Ludwig van Beethoven's piano concertos in two concerts.

To just play one of Beethoven's barn-burners is taxing enough for most pianists, so for Kahane to do three in one concert (July 1) and two in another (July 3) - while conducting the orchestra at the same time - is downright astonishing. It's something he will do this season only in Eugene and at the Hollywood Bowl (Aug. 12 and 14).