Musical Mishmash

SERENDIPITY ON THE TOWN: The goddess of cultural/cosmic coincidence blew a kiss at Santa Barbara last Saturday night. Katy Perry, the globe-owning pop superstarlet with Goletan roots, was deep into her amazing concert at the Bowl, the first of a two-night stand there, and one of her multiple references to the old (and future) hometown came when she thanked her parents for “spending a lot of money on lessons at the Music Academy of the West. I didn’t practice much, obviously.” Perry was a self-admitted slacker in her operatic studies in the off-season Music Academy in her teenage dreaming days, and she rewrote her own lesson plan, which seems to have worked out quite beautifully for her in the commercial long run.

Perry may not have realized it, but at that very same moment, the so-cited Music Academy was bringing another grand summer season to a grand, thinking person’s close several blocks up Anapamu Street at the Granada, to the tune of Stravinsky’s masterpiece Le Sacre du Printemps (Rite of Spring). No less a major conductor than Leonard Slatkin was leading the Festival Orchestra charges in Stravinsky’s challenging, game-changing modernist masterpiece, which this longtime local music-addict doesn’t remember being performed in Santa Barbara in recent memory (the Santa Barbara Symphony planned to do it, back in Gisele Ben-Dor’s ‘90s era, but it was switched out for one of the easier and more populist Stravinsky ballets).

Unfortunately, I was busy covering Perry’s Saturday night feverish show and had to miss the Rite, but it’s hard to complain, considering the mighty impression delivered at the Bowl. Haiku review of Perry’s high-style, high-production concert: big, unerring voice, semi-ironic and nostalgic attitude in the hit-studded mix (five #1 hits from her current album alone), a winsome and winning approach to her work, the Pop Event of the Year hereabouts, without a doubt.