Review | Powers of Seven

Charismatic Vocalist Storm Large Duly Fires up “The Seven Deadly Sins” in Adventurous Santa Barbara Symphony Program

Storm Large and the Santa Barbara Symphony perform "The Seven Deadly Sins." | Photo: Josef Woodard

Sometimes, the sudden and powerful presence of a cultural force before us can alert us to its earlier absence: call it the “we didn’t know what we were missing” syndrome. A recent case in point: the weekend that Kurt Weill sprang to life at the Granada Theatre. We now recognize that, although Santa Barbara boasts many artistic riches, we have been Weill-deprived.

Specifically, the Portland-based dynamo vocalist Storm Large, broadly acknowledged as a Weill-ian champion, put her indelible and raucous stamp on the Weill/Bertolt Brecht masterpiece from the 1933 The Seven Deadly Sins, as the centerpiece of the most adventurous concert in the Santa Barbara Symphony season.

The concert’s first half was admirably mostly devoted to the work of Black composers, living and dead — Jesse Montgomery and William Grant Still, respectively — and a savory appetizer of an opener in Jacques Ibert’s “Divertissement.” Still’s compendium of charming miniatures warmly affirms Black heritage, while Montgomery, one of the strongest voices among younger Black composers today, asserts an infectious rhythmic tug and lyrical harmonic palette with her 2006 piece “Strum,” originally for string quartet and here expanded for string orchestra.

Clearly, though, the Sins amounted to the evening’s special centerpiece.

In an interview before heading to Santa Barbara, Large — whose various musical roles and genres included a stint with Pink Martini, with which she appeared at the Arlington Theatre in 2015 — asserted her love of Weill/Brecht allegory, although she was initially cool about the piece. Playing off the Biblical source, the work depicts the protagonist Anna as a multi-faceted and conflicted American wanderer who becomes disenchanted by the materialistic excesses and capitalist greed of this country.

The piece, Large said, “really has become one of my favorite things to perform. The humor in the horror and the grace in the grotesque are such a fun mental and physical challenge for me, embodying all of it and telling the whole story to the audience, all without big, emotional cues telling them how to feel about it.”

Storm Large and the Santa Barbara Symphony perform “The Seven Deadly Sins.” | Photo: Josef Woodard

In all her dangerously seductive theatrics and Weimar Republic-an demimonde cabaret wardrobe, not to mention her meeting the chameleonic demands of the seven-shaded role (sung in English), Large impressively seized the Granada stage. But she couldn’t do it alone. SBS maestro Nir Kabaretti boldly led the orchestra through Weill’s signature mix of musical theater and salty patches of modernism, while the male singers in the Weill-specializing Hudson Shad Quartet punched up the game with their serio-comic “Greek chorus” peanut gallery interjections.

Humor arrives in shades of dark irony, along with the trademarked Weill-ian turf of surprising harmonic detours and spicy dissonances, jazz colorations, and fleeting passages of bittersweet melody. Large, with and without her jumbo overcoat and occasionally adding the contemporary touch of doing selfies onstage, flexed her thespian and musical versatility at the Granada. She dove headlong into the “Lust” movement, with the cabaret dancer Anna now in a love triangle in Boston and segued from the terse turns of “Envy” into the graceful but resigned resolution of the Epilogue finale, back home in Louisiana. She ends up back home, the wiser and warier.

As an audience, we felt as if we’d taken a journey with Anna, a journey both real and metaphorical. The end result is a sign of success in musical theater terms, but by the unconventional rules of order such as Brecht/Weill concocted here.

With our Weill appetites having been sufficiently wetted, here’s hoping that more of his music can find its way into the local live music ear space.