Hahn Hall, the acoustically blessed chamber-sized music venue on the Music Academy of the West’s sylvan Miraflores campus, has been very good to an ever-expanding list of world class musicians — and vice versa. To cite three examples of the symbiotic link of artist to space, cellist (and MAW alum) Joshua Roman, double bassist Edgar Meyer (a 2019 “Mosher Guest Artist” at the Academy), and young genre-hopping classical-bluegrass-etcetera-ist Tessa Lark.
On Thursday, January 8, the threesome comes together for a promising meeting of like-minded and unabashedly eclectic virtuosos, as part of MAW’s “Mariposa” concert series.
On the program will be JS Bach’s “Sonata for Viola da Gamba in G, BWV 1027” — Bach being a bedrock concern for these musicians, like most classically inclined players — and a focus on Meyer’s writing for the string trio format, dating from 1986, 1988, and a new trio premiered by this triumvirate late in 2024. Meyer, whose mastery of Americana and more serious musical “longhair” matters is legendary (and whose local performances including a memorable solo appearance at the Romero Canyon home of architect Barton Myers), was last heard locally in another power trio, with banjoist Béla Fleck and the late, great Zakir Hussain, in 2019.
No doubt, the upcoming evening will also dip into the various extra-classical idiomatic waters these musicians tend to favor, including bluegrass, or “newgrass,” byways. Roman’s short performance at the Hahn before a MAW gala in 2024 featured a take on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” for example.
Lark made her dazzling local debut at the Hahn last May, as part of the UCSB Arts & Lectures’ “Hear and Now” series of notable youngsters on the rise in the music world. In cahoots with MAW alum pianist Amy Yant, the Grammy-nominated violinist-fiddler organically mixed up the standard classical stuff — Bartók, Ysaÿe, Kreisler, and Corgiliano — with wanderings into revised notions of Appalachiana, and her serio-downhome tune “Jig and Pop.” The tune is the opening salvo of her 2023 album The Stradgrass Sessions (hear it here), which also includes duo compositions by guest Meyer.
All of which is to say, Thursday’s serious hoedown at the Hahn promises to be the first musical event of the new year on an order of a must-see.
The evening with Joshua Roman, Edgar Meyer, and Tessa Lark begins on Thursday, January 8, at 7:30 p.m. at Hahn Hall. For more information, click here.
