Every summer, the community gathers to enjoy a Lake Oswego tradition: concerts in the park.
This year’s lineup includes new performers and local favorites, including the Portland Festival Symphony and 3 Leg Torso.
3 Leg Torso’s eclectic musical influences are made even larger than life by the symphony orchestra and guaranteed to appeal to audiences young and old.
The Portland Festival Symphony and 3 Leg Torso perform from 6 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, July 27 at Foothills Park in Lake Oswego. The performance will feature Lakeridge High School trombonist Elaina Stuppler and pianist and creator of 10 Grands, Michael Allen Harrison.
Béla Balogh and Courtney Von Drehle of 3 Leg Torso spoke with LO Monthly about performing with the festival symphony and summer concerts.
This interview has been condensed for clarity.
MONTHLY: What’s your favorite part of performing at the summer run of festivals?
BALOGH: My favorite part is very much like my dad’s. The motivating energy for performing in parks is seeing your entire community or other communities, their kids, grandparents and folks come out. Sitting next to each other, grooving to the music, having a picnic. Saying hi to your neighbor, sitting next to someone not knowing who they are and then by the end of the concert, hopefully, the music could kind of wrap them all together and we were part of that.
VON DREHLE: I like that, that’s cool.
BALOGH: I just made it up on the spot.
VON DREHLE: I relate to that too, in the sense that when you play outdoor concerts, they might be a little bit less focused than going to a concert in a concert hall. People can bring their picnics, sit on the lawn and stuff like that; as Béla says it allows the community to hang out in a way that is very comfortable. I like that a lot. We just did the Lake Oswego (Festival of the Arts) and in that festival, we're just the four of us as a band and there's a lot of power in that and it's super fun. We’re playing a lot with the Portland Festival Symphony and having our music arranged and orchestrated to play with (an) orchestra is a whole other hugely exciting thing.
MONTHLY: Tell me a little bit about the Portland Festival Symphony. It’s very much an orchestra built out of the local community of musicians.
BALOGH: It’s interesting that you would ask us that, so the founder of the symphony is my dad and he’s been a fixture in the Portland music scene for close to, well, oh my gosh, close to 60 years. I’m dating myself, but he played in the Oregon Symphony and started the Metropolitan Youth Symphony and he founded Portland Festival Symphony in 1981. He’s an immigrant, he came from Hungary and he brought this whole idea of the European parks concert to Portland. And that’s what he wanted to see: people out in the parks enjoying classical music or orchestral music for free.
MONTHLY: Why do you think summer in the park performances gather such large crowds?
BALOGH: There has to be some classical element to it because people know those tunes, from Warner Bros. cartoons back in the 40s and 50s, that was the gateway for a lot of people. Then you have contemporary music, not the Brahms, the Bach, the Beethoven but things from the 20th century, now the 21st century. I think that’s great to keep the orchestra playing; we’re still using all of these instruments, the full orchestra playing our tunes. That's the most powerful feeling when you start something on your fiddle at home or on your piano at home and then it just grows into this gigantic energy ball of musicians.
VON DREHLE: Orchestral blossoming. Yeah, I also think that orchestras are so often presented in the concert hall and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's a more controlled and to some people kind of a stuffy environment. When you go see orchestral music in a park, it's a chance to hear this stuff in a less formal setting. I like listening to a lot of music; I don't put on a suit and tie to listen to it. So it’s just a chance to maybe go out in cut-offs and a T-shirt and you get to hear the orchestra.
MONTHLY: What songs are you doing new arrangements of that you’re playing with the symphony? What are you excited about?
VON DREHLE: I’m excited by the fact that our music, a lot of it is structured, but a lot of it contains improvisation and some group dialogue which is not common in orchestral music. Sorry, my birds are making some noise. Nature and setting are part of the beautiful thing. When you hear music in the moment, nowadays with digital editing and everything you can take away imperfections, you can change imperfections that are recorded. I like things that happen in the moment, dialoguing with what happens in the moment. What about you Bela?
BALOGH: I was just absorbing everything you were saying, I think I’ll leave it.
MONTHLY: What do you learn from getting to play with an orchestra as a musician?
BALOGH: You’ve got another 65 people backing you up and you’re communicating through the conductor, but you're also communicating directly to these musicians. It's a balance so we've learned how to be sensitive to everyone, but also get this music really tight and make it sound good and have a great show.
VON DREHLE: The conductor is like the principal voice talking to the orchestra. But when we get into rehearsals, sometimes it's us talking to the orchestra and how do we explain what we want? How do we demo it? We’re used to being a four-piece, we’re all educated musicians who do this thing, we were also once rock musicians. When we talk to the symphony we actually want to communicate some of that rock energy and high-spirited stuff, but we also need to expand our communication to a more classical symphonic language at the same time, too. That’s kind of a frontier of learning for us.
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