Mission

The Portland Baroque Orchestra is dedicated to presenting spirited, authentic interpretations of 17th and 18th century music to a wide audience and, through outreach and dialogue, to educating the community about baroque music: its composers, themes, instruments, and performance practices.

What is PBO?

Emerging twenty years ago as a grass-roots cooperative of musicians, the orchestra has matured as a polished, professional organization with a loyal and committed audience that now numbers some 1000 subscription ticket holders and 1100 single-ticket purchasers. The group offers performances in downtown Portland at the First Baptist Church and at Kaul Auditorium on the Reed College campus.

PBO inhabits a modest yet critical niche in the Portland arts community. PBO's highly specialized orchestral mission complements the Oregon Symphony’s broader purpose. Its narrow focus contrasts well with Friends of Chamber Music and Chamber Music Northwest and its vocal offerings are on a different scale from those of Portland Opera. PBO joins the others to offer the classical music lover a multi-faceted array of options.

The Portland Baroque Orchestra specializes in performing baroque and classical music on original instruments, or replicas, from the time the music was composed. These instruments, and the techniques used to play them, produce an orchestral texture very different from that of their modern counterparts. The improvisation and wit of historically informed performance practices add freshness, clarity, and vitality to the music of Buxtehude, Corelli, Purcell, Scarlatti, Bach, Telemann, Couperin, Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven and many others, linking us directly to a rich and vital past.

PBO’s artistic excellence places it squarely within the ranks of the best baroque orchestras in North America and Europe. Many consider music director Monica Huggett to be the premier baroque violinist performing today. A growing list of the world's best singers, guest conductors, and instrumentalists in the field of baroque performance now consider Portland an important addition to their musical resumes.

PBO’s Significance to the Community

• In PBO, Portland has a world-class cultural asset that enhances the area's potential for economic development and the city's reputation as a ‘happening’ cultural center. Few US cities have period instrument orchestras that rival PBO’s high artistic caliber.
• PBO is a unique community resource for outreach and education. PBO brings music of the period to life with historically informed interpretations on instruments of the time or replicas – a journey back in time with historical and cultural significance.
• PBO provides an excellent starting place to engage new classical music listeners, bringing highly accessible music to the potential audience for all classical music organizations in Portland.
• PBO provides musicians from the Pacific Northwest with employment and the opportunity to perform with internationally recognized baroque artists and directors.
• PBO employs many other people in different capacities, including office staff, local arts consultants, accountants, graphic designers, printers, and marketing and development professionals.

PBO in the Community

PBO has two primary functions within the community:

• PBO performs a series of regular subscription concerts in metropolitan Portland, as well as special concerts in Corvallis, McMinnville, Astoria, Roseburg and other locations throughout the state.
• PBO supports a variety of educational and outreach activities to increase knowledge and appreciation of period instrument performance and early music:

• Pre-concert talks before each performance
• House concerts
• Coaching and performances in local schools
• Family concerts
• Master classes
• Radio interviews with various artists
• Instructive articles in the orchestra newsletter, ‘The Baroque Enquirer’, and on PBO’s website
• Collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting and KBPS
• Judicious low-cost and free ticket availability

Notable community involvement

Radio broadcasts bring PBO to listeners who cannot travel to live performances. Concerts are broadcast locally on KBPS, with an audience of about 90,000, and on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, the most listened to classical radio music program in North America with about 1.6 million listeners.

PBO performed nine outreach concerts in the 2001-02 season, supported by a grant from The Spirit Mountain Community Fund. Four of these were free family concerts that reached over 600 children.

PBO has established a partnership with DaVinci Middle School, Portland Public Schools Arts Magnet, to provide ongoing musical coaching and presentations.

PBO regularly makes tickets available to a variety of social service agencies, for example, The Miller School, Cascade Aids, and Oregon School for the Blind. A limited number of free tickets are available to Portland Public School students and their parents/guardians. Tickets are steeply discounted for seniors and, through the Young Audiences ArtsCard program, students. Group rates are also available.

Oregon Public Broadcasting has produced two one-hour television programs featuring PBO. The April 2003 Oregon Artbeat featured the performance and the story behind the commissioning of Groove Theory: Concerto for Violin, Harpsichord, and Percussion by native Oregonian Hollis Taylor.

PBO and the Portland Art Museum joined forces in October 2003 with An Evening of French Baroque Music and Art, an event that recreates the ‘arts’ of the time to enhance audience appreciation of both.

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