ON the Beat | Gilded Cinema, Gone Orchestral

The Santa Barbara Symphony Team is ready for Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece 'The Gold Rush', with live orchestral accompaniment. | Photo: Courtesy

What is a good cure for SBIFF hangover? One answer found its way into The Granada Theatre on Sunday afternoon, in the form of a “hair of the dog” RX. Neatly synced up with the finale of the 12-day SBIFF, the Santa Barbara Symphony (SBS) presented Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Gold Rush, with live orchestral accompaniment. The results: pure sight and sound and physical comedy gold.

Charlie Chaplin in ‘The Gold Rush’ | Photo: Courtesy

Chaplin himself recut and scored his original 1925 classic in 1942, and this version of the film and orchestral score was created only after recovering scenes thought lost and expanding of the orchestral score in 2007 by composer and conductor Timothy Brock. The score puts a personal touch on Chaplin’s versatile creative genius, which includes dazzling feats of physical comedy and gymnastic choreography, along with an underlying pathos and sense of atmosphere.

In the film’s premise, we’re swept into the stormy and greed-driven frontier of the Alaskan Gold Rush, rooting for our beloved “tramp” character protagonist as he suffers through abuses — not the least of which is trying to win the love and affection of would-be Georgia. Musically, the score is an affecting pastiche. Original music mixed in with snatches of Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov like “Flight of the Bumblebee”, Puccini, and more, and, oddly, a patch of a Christian doxology in the Alaskan saloon at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

It’s safe to say that Chaplin’s undisputed gem of silent era cinema — and cinema, period — was the best film shown in public in the past two weeks, no slight to SBIFF intended. At the Granada, guest conductor Lucas Richman, who has worked in and with film in his career, skillfully led and synchronized the SBS, which happens to be well-stocked with musicians with extensive experience as film music session players.

All in all, SBS achieved a moving filmic/orchestral high, unofficially capping off the cinematic pageantry of SBIFF. The organizations ought to go on meeting like this on the calendar.

A Marriage Made in the Lobero

From left: Opera Santa Barbara’s Figaro | Photo: Zach Mendez; Opera Santa Barbara’s Figaro | Photo: Zach Mendez

It’s that time again, and not a minute too soon for local opera-philes and the opera-curious: Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) is kicking up its operatic machinery, as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro takes its place in OSB’s four-production season, Friday night (Feb. 21) and Sunday afternoon (Feb. 23) at the Lobero Theatre. In the refreshed setting from projection and set design artists Sara Widzer and Yuki Izumihara (also behind OSB’s take on Handel’s Semele in 2022), Mozart’s opera buffa classic is transported to a 1930s ocean liner.

Singers Colin Ramsey, Sunwoo Park, and Jennifer Lindsay do the vocal heavy lifting and the company’s multi-hatted general director Kostis Protopapas conducts.

Full Musical Outing

Alan Parsons at SOhO | Photo: Robert Redfield

Deep into the SBIFF experience, always a dive into the cinema vortex for me, I was feeling a need for “real time” culture, and SOhO beckoned, as did the live night of the 10th annual FestForums. The event is a unique trade show/networking opp. for those in the business of presenting festivals of all sorts, and music is a natural bonding agent as part of the program designed by founder Laura Kirby (see interview here).

Last Thursday night’s Benefit Concert and Awards Show at SOhO was for the good cause of supporting the Santa Barbara South Coast Firefighter Foundation. The show also actually perpetuated SBIFF’s film artist vein, in that it featured actor Matthew Modine as a tribute subject and speaker. A friend at SOhO quipped that Modine, “passed by me and it was a six degrees of Kubrick moment,” referring to Modine’s potent performance in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

On the musical menu was local and frequent fundraiser performer Alan Parsons, backed by almost the same band backing him at the recent SOhO tribute to the late, great local radio host Gary Fruin. The line-up did include new additions to the crew, including keyboardist Sio Tepper. Sophie B. Hawkins also weighed in with a few tunes, climaxing with her spunky funky 1992 hit “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover.” To the dismay of some, Jerry (Talking Heads) Harrison was a no-show, but the music played and the crowd swayed. In real time.

To-Doings:

Blues of the acoustic kind will shiver the floor, craniums, and rafters of the Unitarian Society on Saturday, February 22, when the hoary Santa Barbara Blues Society (SBBS) (48 years old and counting) brings back acclaimed Doug McLeod for its annual Member Appreciation Show. It will be an intimate and “unplugged” variation on the blues theme normally presented in full band regalia at the SBBS’ customary venue, the Carrillo Rec Center.

The SBBS members are in good hands: McLeod, 78, is a multiple Blues Music Award winner, including 2024 Blues Music Award for Acoustic Album of The Year for Raw Blues.

High on the list of music worth heading over the hill to Santa Ynez for (if, in fact, you’re on the Santa Barbara side of Highway 154), is the ongoing and deep-historied Santa Ynez Valley Concert Series, nestled in the music-friendly environs of Los Olivos’ St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley church. Next up in the current season arrives this Saturday night (Feb. 22), with a visit by the respected Trio Céleste, comprised of violinist Iryna Krechkovsky, cellist Ross Gasworth, and pianist Kevin Kwan Loucks. The trio will perform an intriguing program, with Vasyl Barvinksy’s Piano Trio No. 1, Frank Martin’s Trio sur des melodies populaires irlandaises and, from a closer-to-standard-fare place, Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2.