ON the Beat | Banjo and Organ on the Brain, and Other Living Music

Thomas Mellan at First United Methodist Church | Photo: Josef Woodard

On Saturday at Campbell Hall, the remarkable banjo master Noam Pikelny, smitten by the scenic beauty of the UCSB campus area,told the crowd, “If we suddenly drift out of focus for a minute, it’s just because we’re remembering the walk down to the beach we took this afternoon.” He slipped into a mock foggy drift, for comic effect.

But, alas, there were no foggy moments during the stunning set of originals and classic material given by Pikelny and his gifted “friends” — a new band for the banjo virtuoso with down-home charm to spare. (One friend of particular note was the mandolinist Teo Quale, one to watch for in the bluegrass orbit.)

Best known for his work with the Punch Brothers, Mighty Poplar, and Leftover Salmon, Pikelny has won rightful kudos from those in the know. He was granted the first Steve Martin Prize in Excellence in Banjo and Bluegrass. His technique is impeccable and his solos show sometimes mind-bendingly sophisticated twists and turns, beyond standard banjo orthodoxy as we know it.

On Saturday, Pikelny and band oscillated without blinking between progressive original tunes and the old school side of the bluegrass spectrum. After an odd-time opening tune, a meaty slice of 21st-century style bluegrass, they traveled through songs of Norman Blake, Bill Monroe, Josh Ritter, and others, and into originals such as Pikelny’s “My Mother Thinks I’m a Lawyer,” sporting a funny, loping slink. The show ended with bedazzling fast tunes equipped with tight unison melody playing and ending the night with facile-fingered Jimmy Bryant’s “Laughing Guitar.”

On the tender side, the first encore found Pikelny going solo, with a rippling texture reminiscent of Francisco Tárrega’s classical guitar classic “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.” In this challenging piece, and the show generally, nofoggy moments were detected.

Promethean Academy Alum Power

Prometheus Quartet | Photo: Emma Matthews

The Music Academy of the West’s (MAW) musical gorge-fest of a summer festival can be, for those of us in its lure, a happily immersive experience, after which some pains of cultural withdrawal ensue. To the semi-rescue comes the “Mariposa Concert Series,” a set of worthy concerts sponsored by MAW throughout the year. Generally, some Academy-affiliated link is attached to the artists, as with the mind-blowing JACK Quartet concert last year.

With the series’ opening concert, Friday at Hahn Hall, the Academy connection ran deep and fresh — the young and extra gifted Prometheus Quartet was awarded the emerging artist prize this summer, where they studied and performed with the Takács Quartet, Jeremy Denk, and others. As part of the award, this hot, Juilliard-spawned quartet was granted this concert spotlight, which also served as their professional debut.

Friday’s concert fully validated the quartet’s prize-worthiness. And the program was provocative, to boot. Although the second half was given over to the standard brand stuff of Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 4 in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2, the real centerpiece of the evening came before intermission, with the interlaced one-two punch of Beethoven’s early String Quartet in B-flat, Op. 18, No. 6, followed logically by Caroline Shaw’s briefish but punchy Blueprint — directly inspired by and borrowing from the last movement of the Beethoven piece.

While the earlier movements exemplify Beethoven’s strong Haydn-esque approach early in his career, he goes invitingly off the rails in the final “La Malinconia” movement.

With its radical contrasts of dark mood-scaping abruptly shifting into sprightly good cheer, ending with a showily rapid sprint to the end, the movement’s split identity contains prescient hints of the complexity (formally and emotionally) of Beethoven’s later quartets. It almost seems pre-post-modern in its kaleidoscopic effect.

In her tribute to this quirky gem of a movement, Shaw’s engaging Blueprint craftily funnels Beethoven’s material through her own contemporary filter and musical spectral analysis. Her piece pays tribute, specifically, to the source music’s profound influence on her as composer and player (she’s also a violinist), but more generally, attests to the continuum of “old” repertoire paying forward via rites of ancestry.

Throughout the program, a taut and refined collective sound emanated from this mature-beyond-their-years foursome. As of this night at the Hahn, Prometheus’s professional adventure began.

Remember that name.

On the Organ Beat

Thomas Joyce at Trinity Episcopal Church | Photo: Josef Woodard

One of the built-in beauties of pipe organs is that the grand instruments are literally built into the buildings — usually churches — they call home (unless you’re Cameron Carpenter, who has brought his monster sampler organ medicine show to The Granada Theatre a couple of times). One has to literally go there and be there to appreciate the in-house phenom of a live pipe organ performance.

Santa Barbara got a rare double-dose opportunity to do just that over a recent three-day period, a density enough to warrant a new occasional sub-feature of this column, “On the Organ Beat.” Last Friday in the “Noon Music” series at Trinity Episcopal Church, that church’s regular organist, Thomas Joyce, served up a delectable and hearty musical lunch of Baroque music. And on Sunday morning at the First United Methodist Church, that body’s current organist, Thomas Mellan, unleashed the fiendish fury and inspiration of Max Reger’s infamous organ piece Inferno — this being the first in a new series of organ concerts/recitals in this space. Next up for Mellan is a “Halloween Classics from Bach to Burton” program this Sunday, October 26, at the Methodist Church. Info here.

These church organs are the finest instruments in our midst in regular use, presently kept in formidable and artful use by the two gifted Thomases. Is Santa Barbara suddenly an organ town?

Joyce is a specialist in the Baroque zone, as he has demonstrated in the prelude/postlude portions of his Sunday “day gig” and at an impressive recital at All Saints-by-the-Sea earlier this year. For “Noon Music,” he dished up an extra generous helping of Baroque repertoire from Bach and beyond. He called up rarely heard pieces by Frescobaldi, Scarlatti, and his “favorite piece,” the 17th century “Tiento de tiple de séptimo tono,” by the Spanish Correa de Arauxo. It is a fascinating meditative work, with dark-toned chords in the left hand (and feet) and improvisation-like flurries in the right.

He closed with the delicious and orderly — and tonality-stretching — thicket of Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor. Like the opening “Batlas de Sexto Tono,” by an anonymous Spanish composer, Bach’s music shows off this organ’s antiphonal trumpet-like pipes, which Joyce calls “the spice rack” — at the rear of the church. Both organ and organist both shined on this lunchtime musical feast.

For his part, Mellan focused strictly on one piece in his half-hour performance — the wild and challenging tour de force of Reger’s Inferno: Symphonic Fantasy and Fugue, which Mellan has burrowed deeply into (check out his recording here). As the organist explained, obsession runs deep with this beautiful monster of a piece, inspired by Dante’s Inferno, which he described as being akin to “a Brahms symphony thrown into a trash compacter.” He also confessed, “I’ve been obsessed with this piece as a teenager — nerd alert.”

His obsession has paid off, as heard in his command performance at the Methodist church. He knows the full measure and audacity of the score. Though often an intense and dense score, with tumultuous passages and sternum-rattling cluster chords, there are soft reflective sections along the route, and a nod to Baroque structure with an elaborate fugue — though in different harmonic garb. All limbs and senses are relentlessly put to use with Inferno, and slackers are not invited to this party. Mellan is the opposite of a slacker.

For another, longer taste of Mellan’s handiwork, mark your calendars for his free-to-the-public Music Club–hosted recital at the Methodist church on Saturday, November 8.

This just in: There are rumors of a meeting of the Thomases in the future, an ambi-limbed “organ eight limbs” encounter. Stay tuned.

To-Doings:

It’s time again for the monthly Camerata Pacifica chamber music soirée, this time on a Wednesday, October 29, at Hahn Hall. The upcoming program leans on this season’s focus on Beethoven piano sonata canon, as played by “respected pianist Gilles Vonsattel, this month taking on the mythic Hammerklavier sonata, Chopin and Mozart’s Serenade in E-flat Major for Wind Octet as chamber treats on the side.

In other chamber music news, the still-young and ambitious Santa Barbara Chamber Players land at the First United Methodist church on Saturday, October 25, with a program of Beethoven, Prokofiev, Kodály, Haydn, and Mendelssohn. At the helm is conductor Daniel Gee, a Westmont College teacher, with Westmont’s College Choir joining in on the proceedings.

Two shiny items on the UCSB Arts & Lectures fall roster beg for attention and attendance this week. Tonight, October 23, see the Arlington Theatre return of the unique and happily hybridizing Southern Mexico/Minneapolis-raised artist Lila Downs, whose large body of workspansMexican Ranchera, Mixteca twists, and inventive but captivating mixtures of both “world music” and stateside pop instincts.

More strictly and proudly American roots are on hand when the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama makes its return to Campbell Hall on Saturday, October 25 (see story here). Their latest in a heap of fine albums is the Grammy-nabbing Echoes of the South.