In Santa Barbara, the diurnal extremes — the long and short of it — are well accounted-for, celebration-wise. Of course, the longest day event-of-choice is the massive, mythic Summer Solstice parade/festival, boasting a storied 51-year history. Its cultural root system taps into, among other sources, neo-Bohemian ideals from 1960s Mountain Drive regalia and general counterculture merriment machinery, with Renaissance faire-y echoes in the margins.
Coming on Christmas time and the Winter Solstice, the festive action heads indoors for a more compact yet still highly community-driven package. We’re talking about Christmas Revels, the openly nostalgic and vibrantly proud Lobero Theatre–based tradition which now goes back 19 years and takes its inspirational source material from European models of the 19th century on back.
After a few years away from the Revels train — due to COVID confusion and other reasons unknown — I returned to its seasonal embrace last weekend, and was mighty glad I did. Singer and natural-born organizer Susan Keller launched this local branch off of a national chain of Revels events, with its mothership in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Keller is easing away from the leadership reins after this year but has built up an impressive and self-propelling cultural operation. The 2025 edition was put together by Stage Director Maggie Mixsell and Music Director Dauri Kennedy.
Unplugging from the modern realities of social media, AI, and Trump-ed terrorism, this cast of many singers, dancers, and actors appeared in pre-20th century costumes and basked in the relatively innocent glow of Olde World culture. Serious musical matters blended in with lighter spirits and play, opening with spatial music circa 1597 pioneer Giovanni Gabrieli, with the Light Bearers Brass Ensemble onstage and the “Strings of the New Dawn” in the opposite corner, front row, stage right. The historical sweep of the menu ranged from the 16th century, Finnish-Swedish hymn Gaudete to the late, great, 20th century guitarist/singer John Renbourn’s “Traveller’s Prayer,” and to tuneful forays by the “Yuletide Youth” chorus, including “There was a Pig Went Out to Dig.”
Following the tipsy revelry of the Cornish Wassail carol, delivered by an especially strong contingent of vocalists forming a hearty chorus, we were introduced to the comedic interludes from the core jester-like characters Sunfool, Starfool, and Moonfool (Tom Hinshaw, Ivy Vahanian, and Mattthew Tavianini, as the mime-ing speechless one).
The audience was pulled into action, singing along with the Catholic Mass–based adage Dona Nobis Pacem (“Grant us peace”), “The Sussex Mummers’ Carol,” and singing and gesturing accordingly on “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Christianity, per se, is rarely touched upon in this mostly secular and/or pagan affair, although the baby Jesus made a cameo in the second half.
Anyone who has taken in and been drawn to the Revels over the years can attest to the fact that familiar songs and recurring traditions are part of the “Christmas Revels” experience, but ‘tis the season to revisit sentimental habits and rituals. Long may it run.
Hallelujah Chorus Line
Another, even more communal musical gathering of long running in town settled into the First Presbyterian Church last week with the 43rd(!) annual “Messiah Singalong.” It all began when father and son Bob and Roby Scott launched the event, as an offshoot of their local classical radio airwave home of KDB. Bob passed in 2015, and Roby continues in the driver/director seat. For 40 of those years, the conductor has been Phillip McLendon, who deftly led the charge, with dollops of winking humor in the “warm-up” preamble (“these are all dances, so enjoy yourself,” “red alert, sopranos,” “no cowbell.”).
Santa Barbara City College’s man of music Jim Mooy organized the orchestra and Erin Bonski-Evans was the organist on hand, with soloist duties luminously handled by soprano Nichole Dechaine, mezzo-soprano Katelyn Neumann, tenor Myron Aguilar, and baritone Evan Hughes — emergent opera worldly star and Santa Barbara native. But the real focus of this tradition is us — well, those of us blessed with a decent-to-very-good voice and music reading aptitude.
The huge, ad hoc choral mass in the sanctuary produced an impressive democratic sound, in what doubles as a kind of performance art, en masse. Newcomer that I was, I accidentally sat in the alto/soprano zone and wondered about the curious looks from my distaff neighbors. I initially thought it was because I was trying to read the pdf score on my phone (underscore trying). But a forgiving holiday spirit rang out in the house, brought to its expected rousing apex on the “Hallelujah Chorus.” (“A lot of you seem to know that one,” quipped McLendon during the warm-up.)
Handel would approve.
In the Christmas Emotional Mix
Christmas comes equipped with ambivalent emotions, of joy and melancholy, tranquility and anxiety, all of which seem to be compressed in musical form in a piece like German composer Max Reger’s organ work Weihnachten. Over at the First Methodist Church on Sunday, in-house organist Thomas Mellan, a card-carrying Reger fan, performed the piece, which opens with sparse desultory moodiness, grows dramatically and then eases into a ghostly soft version of “Silent Night.”
Reger wrote the piece in 1915, inspired by the famous Christmas Eve truce between enemy soldiers embroiled in the WWI trenches (as dramatized in the film Joyeux Noel — a solid choice for “Christmas movie” watching). Beyond the historical resonances of Reger’s piece, part of his “Sieben Stücke” organ opus, it manages to suggest the inherently mixed emotions of the season in a timeless way. (Hear it here).
May we accentuate the joy part this year.
SEASONAL TO-DOINGS, CONTINUED
New Year’s Eveoptionsare plenteous around town, most involving midnight as a celebratory and toast-able ground zero. Meanwhile, the Santa Barbara Symphony’s annual New Year’s celebration is a different animal, an early-ish concert of pops-like nature, ending in time for late-night revelry.
This year, the program features the light-on-the-brain music of Hollywood and Broadway fare, Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, and Auld Lang Syne-ing, with guest conductor Stuart Malina and singer Madison Claire Parks joining the Symphony we know and love several times a year.
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