ON the Beat | Autumnal Notes from All Over the 805

A funny thing happened on the way to the Ojai Music Festival last Saturday … it was November 11. A pleasurable sense of disorientation hovered over this special concert for those of us trained over the decades to think of this grand and venturesome festival as a late spring-melting-into-summer weekend affair. But there we were, basking in the invigorating ambience and substantive new music — by the young and inspired likes of Samuel Adams, Dylan Mattingly, Reena Esmail, and M.A. Tiesenga — at the Greenberg Center of Ojai Valley School.

As artistic director Ara Guzelimian told the audience, this was actually the first “off-season” event in the 77-year-old festival’s history, and it came thanks to the aegis of the “California Festival,” organized by conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen. Several orchestras around the state are involved (including the Santa Barbara Symphony, which performs Kevin Puts’ Contact on this weekend’s program). In this case, the Ojai Festival joined hands with the L.A. Philharmonic, presenting music of these four promising and original — and proudly California-based — composers.

Three of the principal parties in Saturday’s concert were significant figures in the wondrous 2021 OMF. Adams and Mattingly were standouts in a festival rife with young composer talents, and pianist Conor Hanick bedazzled with his reading of Hans Otte’s hypnotic Book of Sounds. Just as Mattingly’s piece for microtonally tuned pianos and harp was a high point of the 2021 Ojai fest, his piece here, After the Rain (2017) won points for originality and personalized purpose on this program. This entrancing and kinetic mesh of altered rhythmic parts, for clarinet (Sérgio Coelho), violin (Gallia Kastner) and vibraphone (Sidney Hopson), further demonstrates this composer’s keen interest in coaxing new life and sonorous intrigue from the post-minimalist paintbox.

Esmail is a fascinating Indian-American composer based in Los Angeles, where her impressive new notions about mating east with west, and other cultural points in her eclectic musical mix, has been heard through the L.A. Master Chorale and now in Ojai, via her 2015 piece Ragamala, with the Zelter String Quartet and entrancing Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak. Closing the program, Michigander-in-California Tiesenga performed — on the electroacoustic hurdy gurdy, along with a string trio — an abridged version of the “duration piece” Ganymedes, to time/mind-stretching effect.

Adams’ new solo piano piece, Etudes, is a jewel of another sheen — instigated by pianist Hanick, for whom Adams wrote a concerto premiered last year. Hanick asked Adams to write etudes for his students at the Music Academy, and the composer instead created a large “etude” based on almost symmetrical small etudes forming an arch. Precise dynamic shadings and contrasts, and subtly subversive agendas, simmer beneath the easy-on-the-ears countenance of the piece, such as the tolling flatted second interval pricking the calm surface of the finale “Clear, resonant” etude. The world’s harsher aspects won’t go away, even in a soothing mist of resonant clarity.
        
We could get used to this autumnal micro-festival concept, with its “off-season” injection of maverick energy in the 805, still an area in need of more new musical fire.

In the Folk-estral Sanctuary

Last Sunday, the unique sensation known as the Santa Barbara Folk Orchestra served up the second of its weekend concerts, in the reverberant, embracing space of Trinity Episcopal Church. Founder, folk musicologist, multi-instrumentalist and singer, arranger, and feat-facing Adam Philips led his able, 25-strong orchestra through a rich trip around the land of Celtic music (versus specifically Irish music, the subject of the next SBFO show, in March).

Phillips has a knack for taking the infectiously simple, roiling tunes from Celtic traditions, from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Galicia, and Brittany, and dressing them up in textural finery of arrangements for the “orchestra.” He also sings a mean Robert Burns tune, “Ae Fond Kiss,” and pared down to smaller groups, such as the Waymakers quartet, a trio with mandolinist Josh Jenkins and harpist about town Laurie Rasmussen, and a trio issuing a rousing medley of Irish fiddle tunes with ace fiddler Devynn Quarles in charge.
        
In all, it was another hot and sweet and melancholic and jubilant and occasionally singalong-friendly night of music from this remarkable project, entertaining the nearly capacity “house” (house of God and sometimes of music — closely related entities).

One-Name Wonder

Violinist Midori came to the Granada last week in her first Santa Barbara appearance in a decade, and reminded us why she is among the great living violinists, partly through her majestic directness and genuine emotional virtuosity. Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Midori was joined by the stellar Festival Strings Lucerne (a product of the landmark summer-timed Lucerne Festival). Playing Schumann’s too-rarely-heard masterpiece Violin Concerto in D minor, and Beethoven’s Romance in F, Midori summoned her purified musicality, from some inner source, readily expressive but lined with admirable restraint.

A nicely varied program had Beethoven in the spotlight, with a finale of the Symphony No. 7 — expertly and exquisitely delivered by an orchestra of proper scale for Beethoven’s time. Beethoven was in the wings, in the form of Richard Dubugnon’s “Caprice IV,” craftily tethered to Beethoven’s profound String Quartet in F, Opus 135, with its musically encoded philosophical gambit: “must it be?” “It must be!”).

The concert’s tastiest surprise came first, with the lyrical but invitingly idiosyncratic “Pastorale d’ete” of Arthur Honegger, a lesser-known member of France’s “Les Six” deserving more love and stage time.

Blues Society on the March, in November

It’s always a calendar-marker when the Santa Barbara Blues Society comes out to play, especially when the blues act in question is among the higher standard bearers around. Such is the case this Saturday when the Cabrillo Rec Center has its rafters shaken by Rick Estrin and the Nightcats, with Blues Music Award trophies and nominations in its chapeau. Returning to town seven years after the last visit, the Nightcats — led by toothy cool singer-blues harpist Estrin — is a resurrected version of the band Little Charlie and the Nightcats, with Estrin’s bluesy and wit-lined charisma in charge now. Suffice to say, the Rec Center’s spring-loaded dance floor will be put to good shimmying use on Saturday.

To-Doings

Another dense weekend of music lands in town this weekend, a kind of final blow-out before the week of Turkey (or protein of choice). On Saturday night, the Lobero Theatre’s busy calendar features a return from veteran Canadian folk-rocker Bruce Cockburn. Now 78 and sporting a David Letterman–esque beard, Cockburn has created a great body of work, often covered by other artists and is touring behind his latest album, O Sun O Moon. No doubt, at the Lobero, he’ll call upon his anthemic classic “Wonder Where the Lions Are,” on which he confesses “I’m thinking about eternity.” Yes, in terms of the modern folk scene, he is a lion among lambs.

Another brand of veteran, Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, hits the Lobero on Friday. He’ll be tracing his storied history, in a tour dubbed “Genesis Revisited, Foxtrot at 50 + Hackett Highlights.”

This weekend’s edition of the Santa Barbara Symphony season, on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the Granada, bypasses the usual guest soloist tradition in favor of a threesome, the crossover sensation Time for Three, performing Kevin (The Hours) Puts’ Contact. See story at independent.com.
        
This week’s classical calendar includes a very rare two-night spotlight on a pair of the greatest living pianists in our town, between Sir Stephen Hough tonight, November 16, at the Lobero (via CAMA), and uber-virtuoso Daniil Trifonov at Campbell Hall on Friday (via UCSB Arts & Lectures). See how it’s done by true masters, up close and personal.