Orchestral and Chamber Delights, CAMA-Style 

Even though we have watched it grow up, year after year, it is still hard to believe that the stalwart classical presenting organization CAMA has been tending its noble business of bringing international musical phenoms to Santa Barbara for more than a century. CAMA — Community Arts Music Association, if you must know, but we are on acronym name basis — qualifies as the oldest classical presenting group on the West Coast, and the 105th concert season is poised to begin, to the non-traditional tune of two true virtuosi, mandolinist Avi Avital and accordionist Hanzhi Wang, at the Lobero Theatre on Monday, October 16.

CAMA’s scope manages to be blessedly binary, taking on intimacy and grandeur with music of both the orchestral and chamber variety in its separate Granada Theatre–based International Series and Masterseries at the Lobero. 

Avital has dazzled us in previous CAMA appearances, and will no doubt do likewise next week, but young accordion Wang is making an eagerly anticipated Santa Barbara debut. The Chinese-born musician is doing her part in bringing overdue focus on a great and underrated instrument, in a classical context. For a sample of her brilliance and interpretive aplomb, give a listen to her 2018 album On the Path to H.C. Anderson here. (Interestingly, this is a relatively big season for serious squeezebox culture, between this event and Camerata Pacifica’s newly commissioned accordion-featured work by Clarice Assad, at Hahn Hall on May 17.)

Together, Avital and Wang will take on a healthy diversity of material, from Bach to Bartok and Stravinsky, the violin/mandolin showpiece-work of Kreisler and Sarasate and De Falla and Saint-Saens.

To open the International Series at the Granada on December 12, we’ll get a special visit from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which shares a birth date with CAMA and has been a part of its concert seasons from the beginning. What is rare in the long CAMA/LA Phil relationship, is the bookending effect of closing last season and opening this season with the same ensemble.

Last May’s LA Phil concert, under Gustavo Dudamel’s baton, featured a refreshingly challenging program with two fascinating premieres by young female composers, Ellen Reid and Carolyn Smith, before bringing it home with Beethoven’s Seventh. On December 12, the LA Phil returns in the first of four “International Series” concerts this season, but this time with the LA Phil‘s maestro emeritus Zubin Mehta back on the podium. The musical fare is far more down-the-middle this time, with Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (with Seong-Jin Cho on piano — also giving a recital at Campbell Hall on December 1, courtesy of UCSB Arts & Lectures).

Mehta’s appearance carries with it another legacy torch-keeping factoid, winning honors for having appeared via CAMA 50 times, though not in recent years.

Moving along into next year, the orchestral roster also includes the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (January 17). with pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason returning to Santa Barbara in soloist mode and another acclaimed American orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (March 8). Closing out the season, orchestrally, CAMA gives us a return visit from Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, with Joshua Bell in charge (April 2), on a program mixing Brahms and Schumann with a new commissioned work by the great jazz/classical arranger-composer Vince Mendoza.

For chamber-sized pleasures at the Lobero, the new Masterseries roster includes heroic and always-welcome repeat visitors, including stellar pianists Sir Stephen Hough, the Brit (November 16), and Hélène Grimaud (February 22), the part-time Santa Ynez resident of global renown. In a unique niche all its own, and with a contemporary music emphasis rare for CAMA, March 15 brings us the local debut of the Sphinx Virtuosi, a self-conducted and self-reliant chamber orchestra launched in 1997 and featuring music of and by African and Latinx musicians. 

This malleable CAMA feast all starts with a profound menu of music on mandolin and accordion on a Monday night well worth getting out of the house for.