American Beauties and Seasonal Heads-Up for Santa Barbara Symphony

Continuing with a happy programming trend at Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS), the upcoming concerts, April 18 and 19, find the orchestra going American again. It could be said that this year, the move has a double-edged resonance. Patriotic gestures are in order with the nation’s upcoming 250th birthday celebration, but we’re also in a dark juncture when the majority of Americans strongly disapprove of its direction from the top down.

That aside, the American program in store is a juicy and not entirely standard model. Yes, the menu includes that old favorite (deservedly so) Gershwin’s An American in Paris, but we also get a reassuring return of Charles Ives, the great American maverick who truly represents the American pioneer/rebel spirit. His Three Places in New England (listen here) is both genuinely and ironically patriotic, stirring up a stew of familiar melodic shards of songs, hymns, and other themes rattling around in his feisty brain, in typical Ives-ian mash-up fashion.

The smartly placed concert opener, Jennifer Higdon’s 1999-vintage blue cathedral (listen here), has the twin distinctions of being a contemporary piece by a living composer who happens to be a woman. She wrote it in 1999, on a commission from Curtis Institute for its 75th anniversary, and dedicated it to her brother, who died a year earlier.

Another great American composer, Samuel Barber, was teaching at Curtis in 1939 for Ukrainian violinist Iso Briselli — now best known for having commissioned one of the great American violin concertos. Doing the honors in the violin soloist seat at the Granada will be the dazzling young violinist Alexi Kenney, making this third appearance in the 805 in the past handful of years. A notably adventurous and boldly gifted musician, the Palo Alto–born Kenney was a highlight of the 2024 Ojai Music Festival, with his Bach-centered Shifting Ground program and role in György Kurtág’s Kafka-Fragments. Kenney returned last season, at Hahn Hall as part of UCSB Arts & Lectures’ “Hear and Now” series, as part of the innovative quartet called simply Owls.

All told, the program ranks high on the enticement scale, in this, the Symphony’s 20th year with maestro Nir Kabaretti at the helm.

Symphonic Season Ahead: Preview Time

Looking over the SBS 2026-27 season, with tickets now available, American music doesn’t appear as a focus, per se. However, one could say that the John Williams tribute aspect of February’s Romantic Hollywood concert — tied in with the post-SBIFF/pre-Oscars and Valentine’s Day timing — qualifies as these shores (and also, incidentally, featuring music of Howard Shore). 

Generally, the forthcoming season roster for our 74-year-old orchestra looks to be another strong and strategically diversified slate, bolstered by the crowd-pleasing stuff of the opening concert’s Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, a k a Rach 2 (as heard and seen in the film Shine) (Oct. 24-25), Beethoven’s Fifth (Mar. 20-21), and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (Nov. 14-15), not to mention Holst’s The Planets (Jan. 23-24) — replete with projected HD images. 

But the list is also peppered with many points of more deep-diving repertoire. Those jewels include the opening concert’s program mate, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 6, respected contemporary composer Michael Daugherty’s Blue Electra — written for locally connected violinist Anne Akiko Meyers in 2022 — and the Richard Rodgers/Lorenz Hart ballet Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, to be performed in May’s season finale program in cahoots with the State Street Ballet. The ballet was part of the 1936 musical On Your Toes, and it seems timely given the poignant Hart-based story of Richard Linklater’s acclaimed film of last year, Blue Moon. That May show also features Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 and Barber’s String Quartet No. 1, featuring the famed and mournful “adagio for strings” movement, writ larger for orchestra.

In another tip of the hat to a medium off to the side of orchestral tradition, April brings a program called Heavenly Opera (Apr. 24-25), mixing Boito’s Mefistofele (“Prologue in Heaven”), and the staged production Casta Diva: Homage to Maria Callas, with music, dialogue and projected images, directed by Jonathan Fox. The vocal talent includes the help of fittingly Greek soprano Maritina Tampakopoulos, bass Zaikuan Song, the still-young Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus, and the Ojai Pixies Choir. 

Opera is something of a specialty for Kabaretti, who has been conducting opera in high-end European houses for years — when he’s not hanging out in the 805, that is. 

His, and our, Santa Barbara Symphony sails forward in promising fashion come next fall.

See thesymphony.org.