EUGENE -- Beall (pronounced Bell by kamaainas) Hall on the university
campus is one of the Oregon Bach Festival's main venues -- an old, plain,
small (550) concert hall with good acoustics.

The main venue of the festival is Hult Center's Silva Hall, a veritable
aircraft hangar (but the warm kind), four times the capacity of Beall, and
made acoustically acceptable only through electronic "enhancement" --
meaning amplification.

Today, there was a strange kind of switch here: the Discovery Series
featured four great big voices in Beall and harpsichord concertos in Silva.
It's a good thing that beyond the confusion in venues, both events were
quite wonderful.

Those voices belong to important singers who are not yet well known enough,
some because of their age.  Certainly, Canadian mezzo Susan Platts, at 26,
and with a career mostly in Winnipeg and Victoria, has some distance to go
before becoming better known.  But that she will be, with a uniquely broad,
strong, well-centered voice that's projected far beyond even Silva's dome,
never mind the Beall shoe box.

Maria Jette is a soprano with a golden trumpet within a petite frame.
Peter Mikulas is a bass from Prague with a big body and big voice.  And
finally, Alan Bennett is a terrific lyric tenor from Indiana with an
effortless projection, a memorable edge on top of smooth voice.

The four soloists -- who could easily be the stars of any concert -- were
in fact the supporting cast, along with the festival orchestra and chorus,
in the last of the Discovery Series, an important OBF speciality.

Seven among the 24 invited student conductors participating in the festival
master class took turns to direct Bach's Cantata No. 10 ("Meine See erhebt
den Herren") that they spent days preparing under the direction of Thomas
Sommerville.

The young conductors also participate in workshop/ performances of two
other Bach cantatas, and the Mozart Requiem with festival director Helmuth
Rilling and musicologist Robert Levin, whose version of the Requiem is
being performed.

Rilling and Levin (who has quickly become a festival favorite with his
Bernsteinesque lectures) were in Silva tonight for a rare program of all
three Bach harpsichord concertos -- the C minor, BWV 1060, which is a
transcription of a concerto for oboe and violin; the C minor, BWV 1062,
originally a concerto for two violins; and the C Major, BWV 1061a, which
is the only one Bach originally wrote for the instrument during those
productive years at Coethen.

With Levin and Jeffrey Kahane playing the harpsichord -- with precision
and infectious passion -- Rilling controled the chamber orchestra of 10
so thoroughly that the solo instruments were never obscured.

Rilling is a great practicioner of pacing.  Using a dozen musicians
on stage in the main hall tonight, he "rested" his forces for Sunday's
huge event, Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, not the one that's called
"Symphony of a Thousand," but requiring forces in that seem to be in the
same neighborhood.

Another balancing act is this year's relatively low-key programming, all
the better to apply resources to the big Year 2000 Oregon Bach Festival:
both St. John's and St. Matthew's Passion, the B Minor Mass, Beethoven's
Ninth...  for starters.  Pretty good for cowboy country!

Janos Gereben/SF
(in Eugene to 7/11)
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