ON the Beat | Symphony Seasonings, Euro-Homing

Santa Barbara Symphony performs with the new Symphony Chorus this weekend. | Photo: Courtesy

Thus far this year, the Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) launched from the standard “Old European” repertoire foundation of January’s Mozart Marathon and journeyed into diverse programming ports. February’s concert went filmic, with a live orchestral accompaniment to Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (at 100), while March’s menu sported the salty-modernist likes of the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht’s The Seven Deadly Sins (with Storm Large embodying the sultry and restless Anna), alongside music of Black composers William Grant Still and Jessie Montgomery in the mix.

This weekend, the Symphony returns home — in the sense of heeding old-school western orchestral conventions — to European sourcing of a profound sort, with Brahms’ masterpiece A German Requiem and Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder. More precisely, SBS’ maestro Nir Kabaretti’s program will take the daring and potentially controversial step of blending movements of the Brahms and Mahler scores, playing up similar themes of loss, mourning, and redemption in both pieces.

This weekend’s program is also a choral/vocal spotlight moment in the season. The new Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus, culling singers from many local choral outfits, will bring more than 200 performers on stage to bring this passionate work to life.

From left: Magdalena Kuzma | Photo: Dario Acosta; Daniel Scofield | Photo: Courtesy

The epic Symphony Chorus and friends will supply the choral heft necessary, while solo spotlights will go to soprano Magdalena Kuzma and baritone Daniel Scofield. Scofield duties include taking on the famed existential lament of the Mahler setting of the Rückert poem “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen (I Am Lost to the World),” with the sighing resolution of its final lines “I am dead to the world’s tumult/And rest in a quiet realm!/I live alone in my heaven,/In my love, in my song!”

It’s fair to say this weekend’s Symphonic encounter may not be its most feelgood evening of the season, but it may be the most sublime.

To-Doings:

Among the many good cultural reasons for south Santa Barbara County residents to head over the 154 hill — apart from the many natural and epicurean reasons — is to hear music in the Santa Ynez Valley Concert Series, which dates back decades to the Schoolhouse Concert series. This season ends with a refreshingly left-of-traditional evening of classical harp, as Emmanuel Ceysson performs on Saturday, April 26, in the inviting environs of St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley Church. He has been principal harpist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic, after years of working with the Opera National de Paris and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Ceysson’s program includes stops at J.S. Bach, Fauré, Mikhail Glinka, and others.

Supporting music in the schools has become a pressing concern in recent years, in the face of budgetary restraints and reshufflings and the short-sightedness of those who fail to understand the importance and character-building power of music in the formative years. To that end, a head’s up: A band fundraiser, put on by the San Marcos High School instrumental music and guard, will take place at Draughtsman Aleworks at Mosaic, 1131 State Street, Friday, April 25 from 6 to 9 p.m. The music will be served up by funk-flavored jazz quintet Channel Five, the San Marcos High School Jazz Band, and La Cumbre Junior High Drumline. A silent auction, raffle, and bake sale are part of the package for a good cause (link).

Miss a chance to hear Bruce Cockburn at your own peril. The masterful Canadian folk-rock-poet-guitar-wrangler is now 79, and arthritis necessitates canes to get around, bodily. But when he locked into song on guitar and piano in his last Lobero visit, celebrating the release of 2023’s O Sun O Moon, notions of disability disappeared and his particular musical magic seized the house. Fingers, heart, head, and voice were perfectly in sync, in a set spanning his five decades of active musical duty. Catch him at the Lobero tonight, April 24.

On Sunday, April 27, the jazz pulse continues at SOhO continues, with the UCSB Jazz Ensemble, long directed by Jon Nathan, performing at 7 p.m., and vocalist Sandy Cummings and Jazz du Jour in the intimate bar zone at 12:30 p.m.

Jazz Ensemble culture continues in a big triplicated way on Monday, April 28, at Santa Barbara City College’s Garvin Theater, with the “Big Band Blowout.” This is the semi-annual opportunity to catch SBCC’s three levels of big bands — the beginning Good Times Big Band, the fine Lunchbreak Band, and the much-prized pride of the region, the Monday Madness Big Band, which presented its steamy finery at SOhO earlier this month. The featured guest is trombonist/bandleader/composer Ben Patterson, whose music and arranged were impressively on display at the recent SOhO gig. Info here.