Falling into a Serious
Cultural Bounty of Music
A Healthy Plethora of Classical and
Other Serious Musical Matters Brighten
Santa Barbara’s Autumn Cultural Calendar
By Josef Woodard | September 24, 2024
Read more of our 2024 Fall Arts Preview cover story here.
Santa Barbaran Symphonica on the March
Now heading into its 71st anniversary season, the Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) continues to prove its worth and might as a home team symphony to be proud of and mark calendars over. Maestro Nir Kabaretti, leader of the band since 2006, will preside over a nicely varied, seven-program season in The Granada Theatre, that begins October 19-20, when SBS goes big with crowd-pleasing staples of the repertoire. The centerpiece, showcasing the orchestra’s mettle and romantic spirit, is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, with the imprint of an enigmatic woman in the origin story.
In a late-breaking and reverential addition to the program, we will hear the concert-opening Homage to Tchaikovsky, by the noted and long-standing composer Emma Lou Diemer, who passed away this year at the age of 96. Diemer, a formidable keyboardist and prolific composer and teacher (who spent many years in the UCSB Music Department), wrote the SBS commission in 2001.
“This piece holds special significance, as Diemer lived in the Santa Barbara area and had a long association with the local music scene,” notes Kabaretti. “Following her recent passing, performing Homage to Tchaikovsky serves not only as a nod to her admiration for Tchaikovsky but also as a heartfelt recognition of her contributions to the symphonic repertoire.”
The programmatic reach also includes another visit to the much-beloved Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo, far and away the most popular guitar concerto on the orchestral scene. Guitarist Pablo Sáinz Villegas, who has appeared with SBS in the past, brings his mastery to bear on the score, also popularized in its jazz-retrained Gil Evans–arranged Sketches of Spain incarnation by Miles Davis.
On a rare one-night-only occasion, on November 17, the symphony takes a little French-ward trip with the de rigueur moniker French Connections. Here, noted pianist and conductor David Greilsammer takes on dual duties as maestro and piano soloist. Greilsammer’s established appreciation of music from early to contemporary/modern is neatly represented in a program spanning a diverse course from 18th-century Baroque music to the early 20th century. The sweep ranges from French Baroque master Rameau’s Orchestral Suite from Platée to jazz-informed and tasty modernist Darius Milhaud’s witty Le Bœuf sur le toit. Also on the program is a German composer’s spin on a French theme, Haydn’s Symphony No. 85, “La Reine,” and Ravel’s famed Piano Concerto in G, which also includes jazz elements known to cause pleasure.
Also in the carefully diversified mix of programs this season in 2025 are a Mozart Marathon; one of the regular symphony-goes-to-the-movies events with a live orchestral setting of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins along with a Jessie Montgomery piece and more, and featuring vocalist Storm Large; Brahms’s Requiem (Apr. 26-27), with various local choral groups in tow; and closing out with a Gil Shaham Weekend. The legendary violinist will be featured in two separate programs, a ripe season finale strategy.
See thesymphony.org.
Operatic Venturing
Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) has been keeping the faith and the operatic flame alive in town, through varying degrees of thick and thin over the course of some 70 opera productions and 30 years since the company’s founding in 1994. The last few years have seen dramatic changes and inventive experiments, grappling with the COVID lockdown, the slow-to-return audience factor, and the challenge of staging a “grand opera,” as OSB learned through last fall’s ambitious but fiscally short-falling Carmen at The Granada Theatre.
This season, the company goes lean — with three productions in the intimate Lobero Theatre — and traditional in terms of repertoire, but with no less passion or commitment. Intrepid and multitask-ready OSB head Kostis Protopapas commented, “As opera companies nationwide are adapting to new financial realities, our ability to create amazing shows on a smaller scale is a great advantage…. In recent seasons, our audiences have responded enthusiastically to the up-close-and-personal opera experiences in the Lobero.”
OSB kicks off with Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s 1890-vintage Pagliacci (Nov. 8 and 10). Though not a comic opera, the premise involves the tragic clown business of a commedia dell’arte troupe leader led to murder as a crime of passion — an incident inspired by an actual event in Leoncavallo’s life, involving the jealousy-fueled murder of a family servant. The key role of Canio was one of opera legend Enrico Caruso’s signature roles.
In Santa Barbara, Canio will be performed by tenor Robert Stahley, who last appeared with OSB in its pocket-sized abridgment of Wagner’s The Valkyrie in 2023. Soprano Alaysha Fox, whose OSB debut was in the 2021 (COVID days) production of Il tabarro, is also featured, in a production touching on Italian neorealist cinema, from stage director/designer Daniel Chapman.
In 2025, OSB presents Mozart’s classic The Marriage of Figaro (Feb. 21 and 23) and Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment (May 2 and 4). See operasb.org.
Chamber Music in an Ideal Chamber
For more than three decades now, the ensemble/mobile entity known as Camerata Pacifica has become an ever-more-important — and durable — fixture in the specialized niche of classical chamber music in SoCal. Started in Santa Barbara by the charismatic flutist and organizer-curator Adrian Spence, Camerata Pacifica has grown into a thriving organism, with a full season of monthly concerts in Los Angeles, Pasadena, Ventura, and, in the birthplace of Santa Barbara, in the hallowed venue that is Hahn Hall.
The current season opened in September with an all-French evening, and fall’s fare continues on October 25 with a varietal set — Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1, and, from a more obscure and contemporary corner, Kazuo Fukushima’s 1962 Mei for Solo Flute.
The musical meter leans toward more contemporary matters on November 15, with a program moving from the 19th-century comforts of Saint-Saëns to New York–based Iranian composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s Veiled for solo viola and electronics, York Bowen’s Viola Sonata No. 1, Helen Grime’s Two Birthday Fragments for solo oboe, and Thomas Oboe Lee’s Parodia Schumanniana.
Come 2025, we can look forward to another in the still-young annual series of Baroque music on period instruments curated by Emi Fergusion, in a Bach-based program, and the musical spectrum includes Kurt Weill, Handel, Kurtág-arranged Bach, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for piano four hands, and another commissioned premiere in May, cellist-composer Zoe Martlew’s Nibiru for horn and electronics. See cameratapacifica.org.
More Cultural Pickings of the Serious Kind
CAMA (Community Arts Music Association), in its 106th season, brings the classical world — in some of its finest forms — to downtown Santa Barbara, as it has for longer than any other classical presenting organization on the West Coast.
The bulk of the programming in CAMA’s orchestral International Series at the Granada and the chamber music Masterseries at the Lobero takes place in 2025, including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chineke! Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with emeritus maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen and stellar pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard on board. The Masterseries boasts the likes of Garrick Ohlsson, global-local sensation violinist Gilles Apap, and pianist Yefim Bronfman.
But this fall, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra — one of the more esteemed chamber orchestras in the world — appears on October 21, led by Jaime Martín and featuring baritone Thomas Bauer, singing Maher’s Songs of a Wayfarer. On November 12, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, with guest spotlights going to mandolinist Avi Avital and soprano Estelí Gomez, basks in the glow of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Gondola Songs. Over in the Masterseries corner, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers is joined by pianist Fabio Bidini (Nov. 22 at the Lobero), on an old-to-new program plan.
The humbly scaled but aesthetically significant appearance of soprano Julia Bullock’s performance of Messiaen’s HARAWI, (Campbell Hall, Oct. 4) starts the steady flow of serious music presented by the ever-enriching UCSB Arts & Lectures (A&L), and the series continues apace with another strong showing of concert action worth earmarking. The London Philharmonic Orchestra heads to The Granada Theatre on October 12, led by principal conductor Edward Gardner and featuring the irrepressible violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (a k a “PatKop”) taking on Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1.
In other classical news, on November 7 at the Granada, legendary violinist Itzhak Perlman brings along some luminary friends — pianist Emanuel Ax, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and the Juilliard String Quartet.
As always, classical music — however significant a role — is just one stop along the A&L path. On October 8 at the Arlington, eminent gospel singer Mavis Staples performs on a double bill with the acclaimed duo The War and Treaty (Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter), a groundbreaking act bridging gospel and dipping into the country-music zone. Also on the Arlington stage, mariachi/ranchera queen Aida Cuevas brings the program Canta a Juan Gabriel 40 años después on October 20. Shifting cultural heritage, Malian master Habib Koité brings African pop to Campbell Hall on October 30, along with Aly Keïta and Lamine Cissokho — one of the few “world music” events of the fall.
[Click to enlarge] Habib Koité (left) and Molly Tuttle (center with guitar) and Golden Highway | Credit: Courtesy
Bluegrass ace Molly Tuttle, winner of Best Bluegrass Grammy awards in 2022 and 2023, brings her band Golden Highway to Campbell Hall on December 6, and, for holiday cheer and loveable kitsch’s sake, on December 17, the Arlington is again given over to the Holiday Show of Pink Martini, featuring singer China Forbes.
Whereas we have been trained to think of the Music Academy of the West (MAW) as owning the summertime classical focus, MAW has been entering the autumn-and-beyond sector in the past few years, with its Mariposa concert series. This year’s roster, at Hahn Hall, is the most enticing yet, with soprano Karen Slack’s African Queens program on October 5, followed by the much-praised contemporary JACK Quartet (Dec. 7), London Symphony Orchestra Musicians (Feb. 17), and yMusic (Mar. 10), with a premiere by the beguiling young composer Gabriella Smith.
Random sightings and recommended items on the fall calendar: at the Lobero, Hot Tuna (Sept. 30), Herb Alpert and Lani Hall (Oct. 12), fado legend Mariza (Oct. 16), Aimee Mann (Oct. 30), and John Hiatt (Nov. 12); at the Arlington, Lucinda Williams with Mike Campbell and the Dirty Knobs (Sept. 28); and at SOhO, the big 3-0 b-day toasts continue, on November 1, with Zach Gill’s Underground Dance Party Gift Celebrating SOhO’s 30th Anniversary. Say no more.
For more information and tickets, see camasb.org, artsandlectures.ucsb.edu, musicacademy.org,
lobero.org, thearlingtontheatre.com, and sohosb.com.
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