ON the Beat | A Happy Traffic Jam of Serious Concertizing

Bill Frisell band | Photo: Courtesy

It was a wild weekend, at least in terms of the well-mannered wilds of the jazz/classical concert scene in town. Between the thrilling presence of jazz heavyweights Bill Frisell and Wynton Marsalis and various classical season-closers, even the obsessive concert goers among us might have felt overbooked. And yet, the overall cultural quality and sometimes scenic beauty made the excess accessible and served as a reminder of the overall strength of Santa Barbara’s concert life.

As an exciting and graceful finale to the five-day crush of activity, the smart and dazzling Ballet Nepantla capped off the weekend, Sunday at the Marjorie Luke Theatre, as the closing event of the treasured ¡Viva el Arte de Santa Bárbara! (series cover story here).

Double Double, Strings Attached

Gil Shaham with the Santa Barbara Symphony | Photo: Courtesy

On the season-closer front, the Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS), led by maestro Nir Kabaretti, closed out its 72nd season on a high and star-powered note last weekend at The Granada Theatre. In the soloist spotlight was much-celebrated Gil Shaham, making one of his local appearances but in a two-program feature and in tandem with his gifted violinist wife Adele Anthony. Shaham last played with the SBS 28 years ago but has returned to Santa Barbara many times in the interim, just with different organizations.

I wasn’t able to catch the Saturday night concert (due to Marsalis owning Saturday night over at the Arlington), with Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D on the docket, but Sunday afternoon’s husband-and-wife spotlighting concert was a fully satisfying affair. The program’s centerpiece was an ink-almost-still-wet piece by Israeli composer Avner Dorman, A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance, written for the Shaham/Anthony duo, premiered at Carnegie Hall and given its west coast premiere at the Granada.

As a bracing Baroque concert opener, we got a bold performance of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, with the virtuosic couple in the soloist two-seater role. They were in command from the outset, with invigorating, propulsive energy and shifting roles for the soloist. Their lines entangle in dialogue, counterpart, and harmony with each other, while also joining in unison with the string section for certain passages.

The Santa Barbara Symphony with Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony | Photo: Courtesy

The sum effect is particularly moving when witnessed live and in real time, and the aspect of a veteran violinist pairing in marriage and music added a certain je ne sais quoi to the occasion.

That pairing of gorgeous-toned violinists is front and center in Dorman’s engaging and accessible four movement piece. The work changes its emotional garb in self-descriptive movements “Meditative,” “Upbeat,” “Lamentful,” and “Exuberant,” all the while remaining stubbornly fixed in minor mode. “Upbeat” is nervously so, with fast lines moving furtively forward, while “Lamentful” ranged from a mournful melody line to easing into a simple tune play pizzicato as the orchestra slips woozily into microtonal mode. It was a striking moment in the piece.

The final “Exuberant” charges ahead in syncopated, odd-meter fashion, suggesting the Eastern European folk traditions folded into music of Bartók and others. The rigorous riffing of the soloist almost nudges the soloists’ classical “violining” into the folkier realm of “fiddling.” Dancers are welcome here, at least those who can dance to a 15/8 rhythm.

In all, Dorman’s piece is an ear-friendly outing and a suitable gift to a remarkable and virtuosic violinist couple in the spotlight.

Sunday’s program ended with Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, a pleasant late romantic bath of a symphony, with a splashy finale. Kabaretti and co. did right by the score, as we’ve come to expect. It was a fine way to close out the concert, and the season.

But wait, there’s more: The symphony will appear as the resident orchestra, in collaboration with Santa Barbara Records and many local singer-songwriters, for a special David Crosby tribute at the Granada this Saturday, May 24.

Calm and Stormy by the Pacific

Camerata Pacifica (L-R) Jolente de Maeyer, violin; Che-Yen Chen, viola; Tim Eckert, double bass; Irina Zahharenkova, piano; Andrew Janss, cello; Ani Aznavoorian, cello; Sooyun Kim, flute; Nicholas Daniel, oboe; Ji Hye Jung, percussion; Jose Franch-Ballester, clarinet | Photo: Courtesy of Camerata Pacifica

Meanwhile, for Camerata Pacifica’s (CamPac) season-closing concert, last Friday at Hahn Hall, the stalwart and popular chamber music presenter offered up a juicy menu of music new and old, witty and stern, with a sturdy dose of Chopin in the nougaty center (pianist Irina Zahharenkova’s captivating reading of Chopin’s ‘Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante in E-flat’). The program also wisely reprogrammed (and retooled) a piece it had commissioned back in 2014, Lera Auerbach’s “Dreamusic” — featuring the stellar CamPac cellist Ani Aznavoorian. Here we had a refutation of the sometimes true cliché that some contemporary music premieres are also their final bow.

Of primary interest to these ears, we got a rare taste of the should-be-more-famous American composer William Bolcom, bless his erudite and clever heart. “Orphée-Sérénade,” for an 11-piece ensemble, basks in Bolcom-isms, mixing beauty, modernist injections, and deconstructionist horseplay which puts satirical spice into the serious stew.

Camerata Pacifica Principal Cello Ani Aznavoorian | Photo: Courtesy of Camerata Pacifica

(Incidental note: the Music Academy of the West presented Bolcom’s yummy comic opera A Wedding, based on the Robert Altman film, in 2008.)

Auerbach’s music, for a 10-piece ensemble surrounding the cellist’s hot seat, blends plaintive and surging melodic materials with the ensemble weave and a restless, post-Bartók-ish language. At times, we sense a fever-dream landscape in its ambivalent emotional tempers, alternately passive and questioning, with no easy answers. To its credit. It deserves yet another hearing.

A general verdict: CamPac rocked this season.

The Great Outdoors, Headphones in Tow

Up close with Hunter Noack at Bellosguardo, May 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

I have heard the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 before, but never while lying down beneath the piano, or a few hundred yards from the ocean and on a legendary mansion lawn. I can now add that experience to my bucket list (an item I hadn’t known should be there) thanks to pianist Hunter Noack and his unique In a Landscape: Classical Music in the Wild project, which landed on the lavish and dreamy grounds of the Bellosguardo estate last Saturday afternoon.

We last saw and heard Noack, locally, in a cameo with his partner Thomas Lauderdale’s band Pink Martini at the Arlington last December. Noack’s personal project, launched in 2016 and now having chalked up more than 300 performances, takes his nine-foot Steinway grand piano to exotic and mostly natural locales in the northwest near his Oregon home and elsewhere on the west coast. Yosemite and an area close to the Golden Gate Bridge are among the many sites.

Hunter Noack at Bellosguardo, May 2025 | Photo: Josef Woodard

Noack outfits listeners with customized, brand-stamped headphones and invites them to wander a given host site. In this case, the audience had access to the vast lawn and sea-facing cliff, as well as the historic interior of the late Huguette Clark’s storied mansion, only open to the public in recent years.

All the while, the fine pianist dishes up an array of classical pieces, and the occasional pop side step, as with his tasty dishing up of the Sherman Brothers’ Mary Poppins songbook, as deftly arranged by master pianist Stephen Hough (who has thankfully graced the Lobero stage).

Classical music fans who don’t take kindly to excessive talking during performances will be bothered by Noack’s copious chatter between works, including the act of eliciting requests via casual voting. But he’s got the goods, technically and interpretively.

Of particular site-sound alchemy were Erik Satie’s Gnossienne miniatures, Ravel’s “Ondine,” and what was apparently Noack’s first public improvisational piece. He must continue down that path, wherever in the world he may find himself. The Rach. 2 suffered from a cheesy canned orchestral insertion, but listening to only his piano part, while laying beneath the piano? Bucket list stuff.

Dick Dunlap performing in front of his piece “Summer Nocturne,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, September 6, 2018 | Photo: Dane Goodman

To-Doings:

This Saturday, May 24, the musical adventure land that is the Piano Kitchen (PK), newly relocated in Carpinteria, burrows into the p-word of its name. Jim Connolly, famed piano tuner, musician (check out the new prog-rockish band The Moon and Broken Glass, and keeper of the Kitchen is calling the special occasion the Night of the Living Piano, and features four wonderful pianists from the area: Paul Berkowitz, Erin Bronski, Alvise Pascucci, and a now ultra-rare performance by the great and individualist jazz-improv explorer Dick Dunlap. (Find the PK at 4185 Carpinteria Ave. No. 3).