Wonder Boy

by Gerald Carpenter

PRIMAVERA IN THE CITY: This week’s music is
rather skewed toward next week, with only one concert over the
weekend, albeit an interesting one. On Saturday, April 15, at 8
p.m. in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, the UCSB Department of
Music will present pianist Philipp
Richardsen, in a doctor of musical arts recital. Admission
is free.

Richardsen was born and raised in Vienna, Austria, and has been
taking intensive piano lessons since he was five. I’ll bet he’s
glad to be nearly done. His program will consist of two pieces by
Domenico Scarlatti, the Sonata in E Major, K.
380 and the Sonata in E Major, K. 381; Robert
Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn), Opus
133; Schumann and Franz Liszt’s
Widmung (Dedication from: Myrthen, Opus 25 No.
1); Liszt’s Concert Paraphrase on Verdi’s
“Rigoletto”; and Johannes Brahms’s Sonata
No. 3 in F Minor, Opus 5.

After an elegant sidebar of a concert featuring
Beethoven and Brahms but no
Mozart, the Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra’s
mostly Mozart season resumes at 8 p.m. next Tuesday, April 18, in
the Lobero Theatre. The all-Mozart program boasts two works: the
Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K. 543, and the
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 23 in A Major, K.
488. The soloist in the concerto will be the internationally
admired James Dick. Heiichiro
Ohyama, music director of SBCO, will conduct. For tickets
to this lovely Mozart-ian bouquet, call the Lobero at 963-0761.

Now, there are many candidates for the mythical title of
“World’s Most Beautiful Music,” but I know few music lovers for
whom listening to K. 488 would not narrow the field
considerably. After the first movement, you will have used up most
of your choice adjectives — sublime, exquisite, and so forth — and
will have none left for the slow movement, which is, in any case,
beautiful beyond words.

At 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 19, the Santa Barbara
Music Club will offer a delicious Twilight Concert of
chamber music for instrumental and vocal ensembles, in the Faulkner
Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library (40 E. Anapamu St.). We
will hear the Trio in A Minor for Violin, Cello, and Piano
by Maurice Ravel, and the inescapable Mozart will
be on hand in the form of his famous serenade, Eine kleine
Nachtmusik in G Major, in an arrangement for piano duo. Then,
the Westmont Chamber Singers will perform Sacred
to Secular, Renaissance to 20th Century. Admission is free, as
usual. For more information, call 683-0811 or visit www.sbmusicclub.org.

UCSB’s annual Primavera Festival, a multimedia,
broad-spectrum artistic extravaganza — with an emphasis on what’s
currently happening — starts next Monday, April 17, and runs
through Saturday, April 22. In various venues across the UCSB
campus, there will be demonstrations and workshops, performances
and discussions, concerts and lectures. There is too much going on
to cover it all here, so I recommend that you visit www.ccs.ucsb.edu/primavera
or call 893-7001 to get a more detailed picture, and a complete
schedule of events.

But on Wednesday, April 19, we get a genuine concert from the
marvelous UCSB Ensemble for Contemporary Music.
ECM Director Jeremy Haladyna will lead his group
in works of the featured composer of the festival, Anne
LeBaron, as well as Joel Feigin,
Derek Bermel, George Crumb, and
Bobby Halvorson. The program bears the title
New Music: The Gospel According To. It should be quite a
lot of fun.

I shall have more to say about the concluding act of Primavera
next week, for there is a good deal more music to come before the
curtain comes down on Saturday, April 22.