Oregon Symphony brings Montgomery cello premiere to Salem

Salem's Rose Auditorium hosts the West Coast premiere of Jessie Montgomery's cello concerto "These Righteous Paths" on Friday, Oct. 2.

The Oregon Symphony performs the three-movement work alongside Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 and Glinka's Overture to "Ruslan and Ludmilla."

South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, the featured soloist in every performance of the concerto since its world premiere in Berlin on March 20, returns for the Salem date.

Montgomery wrote the concerto around poems by her late mother, Robbie McCauley, an American playwright and leading voice in theater who died May 20, 2021.

The Oregon Symphony is one of 10 organizations that commissioned the piece. In the symphony's program notes, Montgomery said navigating grief over the past five years drew her deeper into her mother's words, where she found comfort and heard inherent music.

Each movement draws its title from one of McCauley's poems. The first, "All the Ancestors and I," reflects what Montgomery called her mother's hopefulness about what happens after death. The second, "Another Train Poem," recalls McCauley's childhood summers riding trains to Georgia in the 1940s.

In the first two movements, Selaocoe improvises in Xhosa, one of the main languages spoken in South Africa. Montgomery described those passages to Oregon ArtsWatch as "like prayer words, like incantations."

Only in the third movement, "A New Song," does he sing and recite the poem's text directly. Each performance is different.

Montgomery told Oregon ArtsWatch she began writing the concerto in early 2025 after meeting Selaocoe at the Trondheim Chamber Music Festival in Norway. The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester premiered the finished work in Berlin, and it has since been performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, the BBC Philharmonic at the BBC Proms and others.

The program runs about one hour and 37 minutes with one intermission. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m.

Rose Auditorium, the Oregon Symphony's new Salem home for the 2026/27 season, is at South Salem High School, 1910 Church St. SE. Patrons enter via the Howard Street entrance. Free parking is available on campus and in the surrounding neighborhood. Tickets are available at orsymphony.org.

Upcoming Oregon Symphony concerts in Salem: