ON the Beat | John Adams on the Horizon, and More MAW

Music Academy of the West’s Festival Leans into Final Weeks, with Plenty of Enticements to Come

By Josef Woodard Fri Jul 26, 2024 | 11:00am

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on July 25, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Academy Update

There’s a buzz in the air for aficionados of classical music proper, contemporary music in particular, and music that generously reaches across demographic/musical taste party lines. John Adams is coming to town, by proxy, with his wondrous Violin Concerto with no less masterful and insightful a soloist than Leila Josefowicz in the spotlight and the esteemed, new music-friendly maestro David Robertson on the podium (hear their performance with the St. Louis Symphony here).

The concert at The Granada Theatre on Saturday, featuring the startlingly fine young Academy Festival Orchestra, promises to be one of the clear and present highlights of this year’s edition of Music Academy of the West (MAW), with the added bonus of hearing Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony on the program. It’s a not-to-miss orchestral occasion in our not-so-humble town.

Another bright spot on the Academy calendar this week takes place tonight, July 25, at Hahn Hall, where Ravel’s one-act opera L’Enfant de Sortilèges is being performed, with May Birnbaum offering director duties. And on Saturday afternoon, renowned tenor Lawrence Brownlee leads vocalists in the program “Uprising/Rising Up,” keying off of his Grammy-nominated album Rising.

In the winding down weeks of the Academy festival, which ends with the gala Granada orchestra concert on August 3, there are still plenty of reasons to keep on top of the schedule of performances, master classes … and picnics. The long-standing tradition of Friday-night picnicking on the grounds before special “Fellow Fridays” concerts performed and curated by fellows has branched out to other picnic-friendly nights at the Academy’s lavish and lyrical home base of Miraflores.

Last Friday was a special “Fellow Fridays” event, centered around a sharp and smartly realized rendition of Bartók’s great Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, too rarely heard in these parts. Bartók’s masterwork fully accepts and showcases the piano’s partial citizenship as a percussion instrument in collusion with twinned forces of doubled-up piano and percussion colors. The 1937 vintage music still sounds fresh and refreshing to the senses and intellect.

Friday’s musical menu also included some juicy and satisfying brass ensemble music — Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium and Henri Tomasi’s Fanfares liturgiques — and the romantic goop-soup of Smetana’s Trio for Piano, Violin and Cello in G minor, which was thankfully brief.

Check out one or both of the remaining “Fellows Fridays”: Tomorrow, July 26, includes music of Joan Tower, BenjamenBritten, and Andy Akiho, and the final Friday fare, August 2, moves from the staple stuff of Rachmaninoff to the more modern enticements of Nico Muhly and the late “guerilla minimalist” Julius Eastman. Not bad for summer Friday fun, serious music division.

Carrot Quartet High

Arancia Quartet at SBMA | Credit: Josef Woodard

One of my favorite sneak attack — a k a pop-up — MAW performances this summer was an action packed 11-minute show in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s McCormick Gallery by a brand new string quartet, the Arancia Quartet, formed within two weeks of their arrival in town early in June. The musical content on tap was fast-emerging young composer Gabriella Smith’s fascinating Carrot Revolutionwith an art world connection given Smith’s inspiration from this quote (misattributed to Cézanne): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.”

Smith’s ever-morphing work, restless and yet somehow perfectly organic in conception, gets my vote as one of the finest string quartet works of the past decade (we can also add Thomas Adès’ Wreath for Franz Schubert, with the proviso that an additional cellist, which had its U.S. premiere by the Danish String Quartet at Campbell Hall). Carrot Revolution opens and closes with a chugging, percussive mode, veering into atmospherics, pinches of minimalist motorist tactics, and a brain-twisting moment when the tonality eerily shifts microtonally downward to a new key. Somehow.

For the local record, Smith has wowed 805 crowds in recent years with a performance of her Carrot piece at the Ojai Music Festival and the L.A. Phil’s premiere of her textural swim of an orchestral piece Lost Coast: Concerto for Cello and Orchestra at The Granada Theatre in 2023.

To-Doings:

Ted Nash performs with the Santa Barbara Symphony | Credit: Courtesy

About a year ago, we were greeted by and treated to the sound of fledgling young musicians presenting their own jazz-based music on the terrace outside the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as part of a program led by noted saxist, educator, and former Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra mainstay Ted Nash. This “Summer Jazz” occasion is back, with young musicians performing tonight, July 25, from 5:30 to 7 p.m.(Nash also showed up in the Museum’s auditorium with guitarist Steve Cardenas and bassist Ben Allison for a memorable trio set, and appeared with the Santa Barbara Symphony last year. He gets around town.)

Under normal circumstances, the classical concert entity known as Santa Ynez Valley Concert Series — like most traditional classical enterprises — closes up shop, replenishes energy, and gets a tan during summer months. Thankfully, the series is going off normal script for a special summer concert next Wednesday, July 31, featuring the Dutch Ruysdael Quartet, stopping as part of a rare West Coast tour.

The prized and prize-winning quartet has recently performed in the chamber music mecca of London’s Wigmore Hall, among other world travels. Among their commissions is a new piece by rising German composer Jörg Widmann (a star of June’s Ojai Music Festival), and a project commissioning 25 Dutch composers in honor of their 25th anniversary.

In Santa Ynez, in the accommodating space of St. Mark’s in-the-Valley Episcopal Church, the quartet will perform several of those small new works, as well as music of Beethoven and Brahms, with the series director Dr. Robert Cassidy joining forces with them on the latter.