This weekend, Portlandia's ultimate cover band ended their program with Aaron Copland's Symphony #3 - a composition whose well-known brassy chorales of American triumph made it an easy dedication to the recently terrified people of Boston.

Monday evening, Portland's big band bid farewell to Hannu Lintu... a guest conductor who is apparently the love child of Garrison Keillor and Plastic Man.

Chief cultural blogger for The Telegraph of London. Prodigious recorder of well over 50 albums. MacArthur genius. Theologian. Poet. Queer activist. Composer.

From the thickest string of the bass to the upper registers of sopranos everywhere, these are towering tones capable of breaking down walls and uniting neighbors.

Elegantly joyful and perfectly crafted, Wolfgang's episodic serenade served as a brilliant showcase for the elite group of orchestral musicians assembled.

Instead of simplistic, romantic notions of war draped in patriotic glory, the listener encounters a more difficult and nuanced 20th-century musical landscape of existential questions, gruesome descriptions, defiant submissions and cold dissonance.

Gustav Mahler's "Symphony No. 6," clocking in at over 80 minutes and requiring over 90 musicians, is massive even by Mahlerian standards; frankly, just witnessing the logistics of this performance was worth the price of admission.

This week, in an event guaranteed to lighten the burden of Portland's early winter drizzle, the Oregon Symphony releases their second album with music director Carlos Kalmar at the helm.