In Wednesday’s (11/23) Register-Guard (Eugene, Oregon), Bob Keefer writes, “Newsman Tom Brokaw came to Eugene on Tuesday, but this time it was Brokaw himself making the news. The 71-year-old celebrity journalist was in town to channel Abraham Lincoln in a Eugene Symphony performance of Aaron Copland’s ‘Lincoln Portrait.’ His appearance at the Hult Center formed the centerpiece of Counterpoint: War + Peace, the symphony’s fall festival of arts events examining that weighty theme. … On Tuesday night, Brokaw made an imposing Abraham Lincoln, standing at the front of the Silva Concert Hall stage at a lectern next to conductor Danail Rachev and sonorously intoning words from the Gettysburg Address and from other Lincoln documents.” Also on the program were John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls and Copland’s “Promise of Living” from his opera The Tender Land. “During its Counterpoint: War + Peace festival, the symphony is performing three concerts almost back-to-back over a two-week period this month and next. The first, featuring Shostakovich’s ‘Leningrad’ seventh symphony, took place last week, and the series concludes on Dec. 1 with Beethoven’s third symphony, the ‘Eroica.’ ”
Posted November 23, 2011
