ON the Beat | The Hallowing of the Hahn

This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on June 22, 2023. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.

Music Academy Corner

By general consensus, a handful of performance spaces in Santa Barbara qualify as sublime, historic, and/or hip on a scale transcending local fame. Certainly, the list includes the mighty Lobero Theatre, currently glowing in its 150th birthday suit, and the idyllic al fresco expanse of the Santa Barbara Bowl. On the transformed 1920s-era movie palace front, the Arlington and the lavishly remodeled Granada have proven to be grand music halls as well.

And the young upstart among prized Santa Barbara music venues is the pristine recital room known as Hahn Hall. The centerpiece venue of the Music Academy is a radical renovation and luminous reinvention of the old Abravanel Hall on campus, enabled and named after philanthropist Stephan Hahn and open since 2008. The entrancing and embracing 350-seat hall is rented out in its 10 “off-season” months and put to good resonant use by Camerata Pacifica and occasionally UCSB Arts & Lectures — which presented memorable performances by harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, the Attacca Quartet, and Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson last season.

In a sense, though, Hahn Hall truly springs to life and fulfills its initial function when the Music Academy’s eight-week summer festival takes over the joint. Last week, a sense of both homecoming and grand reopening descended on the room with the arrival of the Takács Quartet on Wednesday and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard in recital on Friday.

The Takács, in the upper echelon of string quartet life, has become a customary Academy season opening act, and the Hahn Hall connection became more intrinsic with the addition of dazzling young violist Richard O’Neill, who has spent many nights concertizing in this space through his long connection with Camerata Pacifica. Last week, the quartet avoided anything of a modern or Hungarian stripe, but delivered powerful goods from the stalwart zone of the Quartet in E-flat, H. 227 by Fanny Mendelssohn (sister of Felix) and Schubert’s Quartet in G, D. 887, with its hushed rush hour kinetics of its finale.

Takács’ musicians seemed more entrenched and invested in this space, and on the campus where they also serve as mentors — as is the case with most of the world-renowned musicians who pass through the Hahn during the summer.

The magnetic mezzo Leonard, who last appeared here in 2019 and had to cancel her planned gala appearance a year ago, is a prime member of the Academy’s luminous alum club. Following studies with Marilyn Horne here in 2005, Leonard has risen to great heights in operatic and recitalist circles. Here, joined by the fine pianist John Arida — an alum from 2011 and 2012 — captivated the room with her program of mostly Spanish/Argentinian music (her mother is from Argentina) and thinking person’s musical theater, courtesy of Bernstein and Sondheim.

Leonard even tossed in that musically virtuous, if populist, bonbon “Besame Mucho,”  and encouraged the crowd to sing along — with the proviso “now, I expect a lot out of Santa Barbara.”

Great pianist and Academy faculty member Jeremy Denk shows up on Tuesday for a program of all-Bach partitas — a must see if you can. Meanwhile, the Academy heads downtown tonight (June 22), when Takacs return for a “x2” concert with soprano Ana María Martínez at the Lobero, and then to the Granada on Saturday for the first of several Academy Festival Orchestra concerts, this one an all-Berlioz affair conducted by St. Louis Symphony maestro Stéphane Denève.

Check out the MA calendar here.  

The Chairman Slips in the Side Door

Although the Santa Barbara Symphony’s official season of “serious music” closed out with Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in May, Frank Sinatra snuck in the calendar’s side door for some after-hours merriment. And what’s not to love, especially when the faux Frank is as polished and informed as singer Tony DeSare? Last Thursday’s “An Evening with Sinatra” program at the Granada was a fizzy pop night out in the Symphony’s 70th anniversary season, with maestro Nir Kabaretti leading a hybrid ensemble of orchestra, enmeshed jazz big band, and DeSare’s own jazz trio up front.

It all added up to an enjoyable and nicely-paced ride through the long and winding Sinatra songbook (songbooks?). Things aptly kicked off with “Come Fly with Me” and including such gems as the Cole Porter jewels “Night and Day” and “Just One of Those Things,” “Luck be a Lady Tonight” (one-upping the version sung in the film Guys and Dolls by Marlon Brando, who Frank dubbed “mumbles”), the poignant time-traveling “It Was a Very Good Year,” and his late-era “comeback” song “My Way.” Best surprise: imagining what Frank might have done with a pop song as secretly deep as the Bee Gees’s “How Deep is Your Love?”

It capped off with a medley and the final encore, which for some reason was a splashy “Great Balls of Fire.” Some wondered, “hey, where was ‘Fly Me to the Moon?’” Next time around, maybe.

To-Doings:

At SOhO, next week’s musical menu includes a return from the indie-folk-pop-call-it-what-you-want band from Austin, Wild Child, on Saturday. Around since 2010, the group is built around lead singer Kelsey Wilson, also a fiddler, and vocalist Alexander Beggins, also wielding a baritone ukulele. The Wild ones produce a friendly and only slightly wild indie sound, as heard on a fine new album End of the World. Their tour also takes them to the Live Oak Festival in San Luis Obispo on Sunday and the famed Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco on August.

Festival hot ticket tip for those willing to drive a bit: the Live Oak Festival, which decamped close to Santa Barbara, at Live Oak Camp for more than a quarter century before heading up north, closer to San Luis Obispo’s KCBX, the treasured public radio beacon which organizes and gains fundraising muscle from the grand fest. The weekend-long campout event is well-stocked with artists worth driving a bit for, including Neko Case, Galactic, the Wailers, Cracker, Las Cafeteras, Tony Furtado and many notable etceteras. Head on up to El Chorro Regional Park this weekend for a good, organic musical time and worthy public radio-geared cause.