This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on April 19, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
April is an unusually high-density month for significant concerts to the left and right of pop music, so some events may not get the attention and buzz they are due. Take, for instance, Birdman Live, live and onscreen at the Arlington this Friday, April 19. This unusual and fascinating reel/real time sensation features poetic powerhouse drummer Antonio Sánchez, performing his own innovative drum-based score for the film, a program which has now reached its 10th anniversary milestone.
Writer-director Alejandro González Iñárritu cooked up an innovative and surreal portrait of an artist caught in a midlife tailspin. “Birdman” was played by Michael Keaton, like a deer both caught in and also manically aiming the headlights. The ever-creative Mexican-born auteur, whose film wound up winning four Oscars (including Best Picture), needed something beyond a typical music score, and he got one from Sánchez. The live project has developed a momentum of its own, and UCSB Arts & Lectures is thankfully bringing it to town.
At UCLA Royce Hall in 2008, I came, I saw, I heard and was duly dazzled. Further multi-sensory bedazzlement is expected.
Klez-chestral Sounds Meet Mahler
Speaking of jazz — and jazz adjacent — musicians in alternative settings, this weekend’s Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) program (Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at The Granada Theatre) features noted and stylistically elastic clarinetist David Krakauer, of the jazz-klezmer-new music group Klezmatics fame. The program goes by the catchy, fitting handle “Mahler Meets Klezmer: Titans of Sound.”
On the program, Krakauer shifts naturally into his orchestral mode, as soloist on Wlad Marhulets’ “Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet,” on a program opened by a Mozart appetizer and closing with the epic landscape of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan.”
SBS maestro Nir Kabaretti explained that his concept for the double-duty program grew out of the hints of klezmer in the third movement of the “Titan.” He noted that, “Mahler was the first composer ever to introduce traditional folk Jewish music that we called klezmer. This gave me the idea to go a little bit deeper. Klezmer is not something that a lot of people know. It’s all normally played with instruments that you can schlep around, because they played in weddings and parties and things like that. So it was always clarinet, violin, accordion — never piano, trumpets, things like that.
“This new concerto is written for David Krakauer, an incredible artist who was classically trained until he was 30 years old.”
We’re all ears.
Going to the Church in Time
Although Santa Barbara’s vibrant classical music scene’s more high-profile events take place in the larger and better-known venues in town, we can catch plenty of substantial programming in the margins. And that zone of “marginalia” is often based in the city’s churches of note. Within the last couple of weeks, for instance, music lovers darkened the sacred and music-suitable spaces of the First Methodist Church, where the young Santa Barbara Chamber Players concluded its second official season two weeks back, and last weekend’s season closing program by the fine Santa Barbara Master Chorale, in the First Presbyterian Church. Both venues have long proven to be fitting environments for refined music of the live variety, and the tradition continues.
The Master Chorale, founded in 1985 and under the directorship of David Lozano Torres since 2022, presented an intriguing and versatile hour-long program under the title I Will Rise, Music of Resilience. The first half dealt with the implied programmatic theme in a looser way and focused on American music — from the Steve Parsons–arrangement of the timeless folk song “Shenandoah” to Leonard Bernstein’s “Make Our Garden Grow,” from Candide (featuring beautiful soloist work by guests Morgan and Lindsay Parker).
Greater emotional and musical depths arrived in the second half, alluding to the mythic tragedy of Beethoven’s deafness. A centerpiece of the concert came in the form of Jake Runestad’s 2018’s piece “A Silence Haunts Me,” a setting of an infamous letter of despair and suicidal thoughts by a late twenty-something Beethoven, upon learning of his debilitating condition. A tense modern tonal language is laced with fleeting quotations of Beethoven’s music to poignant but, yes, ultimately resilient ends.
Other points of interest, including Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ moving “Trinity Te Deum” and a rousing finale of Beethoven’s “Hallelujah” — from his “Christ on the Mount of Olives.” This lesser-known but exultant “other Hallelujah chorus” succeeded in bringing the concert and season to a fulfilling, happy ending.
Santa Barbara Chamber Players, formed during the pandemic to provide a new outlet for the area’s impressive classical musician population, closed out season number two with a refreshingly inventive program. The standard stuff of the young Brahms’ “Serenade No. 1” settled into the concert’s second half. But the opening half featured the lustrous melancholy of Gabriel Fauré’s “Pelléas et Mélisande Suite” and the nostalgic lament of “Adios Nonino,” by the incomparable “nuevo tango” master Astor Piazzolla, in homage to his late father.
The ensemble, conducted by Emmanuel Fratianni, summoned up a fine, focused sound, crisply led by the maestro. To its credit, the Players also invited several young musicians to join the professional ranks on the Piazzolla. Onward and upward to season three.
TO-DOINGS:
Another hot item on this weekend’s “serious music” calendar is the local debut of young violin sensation Randall Goosby at Hahn Hall on Saturday, April 20. An enticing, equal timing program showcases important Black composers, including Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and William Grant Still.
For those in town who have missed the occasional organ recital in Santa Barbara (we know who we are), a momentary reprieve is in sight. On Saturday afternoon at the First Methodist Church, home to a quite fine pipe organ, the Santa Barbara Music Club presents organizer Lynette McGee coaxing the pipes into official recital action. She will offer a wide range of music, from 19th century pillars Max Reger and Louis Vierne to the living, breathing organist-composer Carson Cooman (b. 1982). Organ geeks and other living music lovers: be there.
This weekend also marks the Big Moment when opera comes, in the form of Opera Santa Barbara’s season-closing production of the accessible and family-friendly 2022 Zorro, at the Lobero Theatre on Friday night and Sunday afternoon (see story here).