WELCOME TO Season 18: SHIFT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | August 11, 2026
WELCOME TO SHIFT
Resonance Ensemble’s 18th season invites audiences to listen. Differently.
PORTLAND, OR—What happens when we change the way we listen? Resonance Ensemble, a Portland-based professional vocal ensemble known for powerful performances that connect music with issues of justice, community, and the world around us, invites audiences into its 18th season, SHIFT—a season centered on music that asks us to shift our perspective and turn our attention.
Through four distinctive programs, Resonance invites audiences to deepen their connection to one another and the natural world through stories shaped by power, place, and the lived realities of people and the natural world. Each concert offers an opportunity to listen more closely to the world around us—and discover how the simple act of listening can, in turn, transform the world.
Welcome to SHIFT.
Your host, Poison Waters | Photo Credit: Carlos Silvas
BRUNCH & BAD CHOICES*
September 26, 2026 | Alberta Rose Theatre
We throw the rulebook out the window.
Resonance Ensemble’s 18th season opens with Brunch & Bad Choices, a raucous, one-of-a-kind fundraiser inspired by the popular Miscast format—and it is exactly what it sounds like.
Resonance singers will take on songs you would never expect to hear them sing, with unexpected pairings, musical plot twists, joyful risk-taking, and plenty of bad decisions along the way. Hosted by Portland icon Poison Waters, the morning is part brunch, part cabaret, part celebration—and entirely unlike a typical Resonance concert.
Guests will enjoy a boxed brunch with bites, bubbles, coffee, and a hosted bar, along with live performances from Resonance artists. And because this is a fundraiser, audiences will have the opportunity to raise a glass, cheer on the artists, and help support Resonance’s next chapter.
Pajamas encouraged. Decorum negotiable. Bad choices inevitable.
10 AM brunch + cocktails • 11 AM show • 1 PM dessert
Brunchy bites + complimentary signature cocktails included with all season subscriptions. Single tickets $50, on sale September 1.
Wildlife photography by Ethan Allred, featured in For the Birds, 2027. Courtesy of the artist.
FOR THE BIRDS
January 31, 2027 | 3:00 p.m. | Agnes Flanagan Chapel
We listen beyond ourselves.
In partnership with Bird Alliance of Oregon, For the Birds invites audiences to reconsider music—and our relationship with the natural world.
Featuring Resonance’s 2026–27 commissioning composer Judy A. Rose, photography by naturalist Ethan Allred, and Edie Hill’s poignant masterwork Spectral Spirits, a tribute to endangered and extinct birds, the program explores birdsong, migration, and our fragile connections to the natural world.
Works by Caroline Shaw and other composers further expand the conversation, asking us to listen not only to the music, but to the world beyond ourselves.
Alfredo Ramos Martínez, La Malinche (Young Girl of Yalala, Oaxaca), c. 1940. (detail). Oil on canvas. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Friends of Mexican Art (1979.86). Photo: Craig Smith. © The Alfredo Ramos Martínez Research Project.
CONQUEST REQUIEM
March 13, 2027 | 7:30 p.m. | The Reser
March 14, 2027 | 3:00 p.m. | Benson High School
We explore histories that can’t be reduced to a single story.
Joined by Orchestra Nova Northwest, Choral Arts Ensemble of Portland, and guest soloists, Resonance performs Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s Conquest Requiem, a sweeping work that invites us to reconsider the stories we think we know.
Through the figure of Malinche—an Indigenous interpreter whose role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico has been interpreted in profoundly different ways—the work explores power, survival, and the complexity of historical memory. No single perspective can tell the whole story.
The concert also features the world premiere of a new work for orchestra and choir by Portland-based Venezuelan composer Giancarlo Castro D’Addona, honoring the life and work of Del Greenfield, a peace activist whose lifelong commitment to peace and justice left a lasting legacy in Portland and around the world.
Composer Kenji Bunch at the premiere of
On This Land, 2025. Photo Credit:
R. Hadiashar
ON THIS LAND
June 27, 2027 | 3:00 p.m. | Agnes Flanagan Chapel
We ask: whose land is it?
Resonance is joined by Fear No Music and Las Matices Latin Ensemble for a powerful exploration of land, belonging, and memory.Kenji Bunch’s On This Land, commissioned by Resonance with poetry by Chisao Hata, reflects on Japanese American incarceration in the Pacific Northwest. Alongside Shruthi Rajasekar’s Whose Names Are Unknown and Freddy Vilches’s Abya Yala, a multilingual suite created with Indigenous poets from across the Americas, these works reveal the many ways history and place are connected.
Together, the program insists that we listen differently to the places some of us call home—and to the stories embedded in the land beneath our feet.
Across the season, SHIFT invites us to listen differently—to music, to one another, and to the world around us. From joyful artistic risk-taking to stories of displacement, memory, and belonging, Resonance’s 18th season asks what might become possible when we pay closer attention.
Season 18 invites Portland audiences to listen differently—to music, to one another, and to the world around us.
Welcome to SHIFT.
Season subscriptions are on sale now at resonancechoral.org. Single tickets go on sale September 1, 2026.
Press inquiries: For interviews or more information about Season 18, contact David Krueger at david@resonancechoral.org.