Fall Arts Preview |
Hearty Harvest for
Classical Music Autumn
The Rich Tapestry of Santa Barbara’s
Classical Music Organizations Steps Up and Out
By Josef Woodard | September 25, 2025
Read more of the 2025 Fall Arts Preview.
Come autumn, the forces of classical music programming emerge with full force in Santa Barbara after the traditional summer lull and simmer (with the exception of the summer festival from Music Academy of the West). These music-nurturing groups annually remind us of the plethora of riches in the “serious music” corner of the concert scene in town.
Much of the welcome gush of options arrives thanks to the efforts of local music and music-presenting organizations with varying degrees of longevity ensuring their continuing presence here (CAMA wins the prize, entering its 107th season). This general organizational health prevails, despite the sundry challenges to survival, such as pandemic woes, fiscal hardships, gutting of government support for the arts (especially now), and competition for audiences.
Surveying the concert landscape of classical music worth seeking out and hearing, the calendar is once again fortified with enticing programs served up by groups with beloved, familiar acronyms including the aforementioned CAMA (Community Arts Music Association), and MAW (Music Academy of the West), as well as SBS (Santa Barbara Symphony), CamPac (Camerata Pacifica), OSB (Opera Santa Barbara), and A&L (UCSB Arts & Lectures — see separate story for info). Other humbler but determined music series and groups flesh out the classical roster around the town and county.
The internationally acclaimed Los Angeles Philharmonic opens the CAMA International Series of visiting orchestras of note October 3 at The Granada Theatre. Although virtually a SoCal neighbor, in terms of proximity, the L.A. Phil has evolved into what many consider the very upper echelon of American orchestras (an estimation put forth by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, for one). This concert gains distinction as the last time we’ll hear them led by the charismatic Gustavo Dudamel, headed for the music director spot of the New York Philharmonic.
CAMA carries forward, following a season that saw the retirement of Executive Director Mark Trueblood after 27 years of service, with the International Series featuring London’s prestigious Philharmonia Orchestra (one of that city’s five prominent orchestras), on October 20, led by Finnish conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, presenting two works by Finnish national hero Sibelius and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 at the Granada. American orchestral powers return to the Granada next year, with the mighty Chicago Symphony Orchestra, led by Riccardo Muti (Jan. 23) and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi and featuring part-time Santa Ynez resident/global piano celebrity Hélène Grimaud on Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor (Apr. 1).
CAMA’s sister series, the chamber-music-geared Masterseries, has its home in the historic and intimate Lobero Theatre and launches this season with a Ravel at 150 recital by Canadian pianist Louis Lortie (Nov. 11). Come 2026, the Masterseries component includes pianist Emanuel Ax (Feb. 4), the Venice Baroque Orchestra (Feb. 17), and Sphinx Virtuosi featuring violinist Randall Goosby (Mar. 12). See camasb.org for more info.
While CAMA provides the welcoming apparatus for world-renowned orchestras passing through town, Santa Barbara orchestra music-lovers have long benefitted from the reassuring presence of our own highly respectable orchestral institution, the Santa Barbara Symphony. The upcoming season has as its notable milestone the status of representing the 20th anniversary of conductor Nir Kabaretti’s tenure as music director. Aside from presiding over symphonic seasons in Santa Barbara, Kabaretti conducts in Europe and elsewhere. A recent claim to fame is his role in the Hyperion label recording War Silence, leading the London Philharmonic Orchestra and pianist Roberto Prosseda in a set of Italian piano concertos.
On the brink of heading into season number 20, maestro Kabaretti said, “Santa Barbara is a very special place — one that I am proud to call home for the last decade. Celebrating this milestone anniversary is an incredible privilege, and I’m honored to serve the community that has embraced my family and me with eight months of concerts designed especially for Santa Barbara.”
The Israeli-born Kabaretti arrived in 2006, replacing the previous music director, Gisèle Ben-Dor, who was celebrated beyond Santa Barbara for her adventurous and Latin American–tapping programming (she hails from Uruguay). In his tenure, Kabaretti has steered the Symphony’s general program focus back to a more traditional range of symphonic choices, while also tending to the importance of variety in a season’s mix.
That diversity principle, without pushing beyond boundaries of audience accessibility, is again in effect in the 2025-26 season. From January through May, the musical pendulum swings from a Beethoven piano concerto marathon through film music, themed concerts built on music from Italy and America, and a finale of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Resurrection. As for the more pressing fall slate, a Russian program hits The Granada Theatre (Oct. 18-19), with a centerpiece of scenes from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet in a dual season opener with the State Street Ballet.
The legendary and sweeping Mozart Requiem seizes the spotlight in the next concert (Nov. 15-16), which also includes music of living composers, Aaron Jay Kernis’s Musica Celestis and Andrea Tarrodi’s Double Trombone Concerto — a co-commission by the Symphony. For more information, see thesymphony.org.
Opera, a notoriously expensive and ambitious medium to properly make manifest, has resourcefully staked its claim in Santa Barbara over many years. Each summer, opera fans and neophytes are treated to impressively realized full opera productions by the Music Academy’s famed voice program, as happened with this past July’s stellar production of Don Giovanni (with its eerie and propitious references to another “Don” — Trump).
In the concert season, proper, even further operatic stimuli come courtesy of Opera Santa Barbara, founded by Marilyn Gilbert and Nathan Rundlett and led by the multitask-ready director (and often conductor) Kostis Protopapas since 2017. Last season’s program had fine productions of Pagliacci, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Daughter of the Regiment. Coming up, all at the Lobero, is a nicely varied three-pack: the Italian seasoning of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (Nov. 7 and 9), a rare Baroque blast of Handel’s Caesar and Cleopatra (Feb. 27 and Mar. 1), and token Americana with Aldridge and Garfein’s Elmer Gantry (May 1 and 3). For more information, see operasb.org.
Over in the chamber music zone, which has gotten busier with such new entities as the Santa Barbara Chamber Players, the venerable source of inspiration is the Santa Barbara–born and now SoCal-dispersed Camerata Pacifica, founded in 1990 by flutist/fearless leader Adrian Spence. For the fall component of the group’s eight-concert season, CamPac can claim bragging rights as the city’s classical season opener, landing in Hahn Hall on September 26 with a program of the old standby Brahms, but also rarely performed Russian composer Anton Arensky and the very much living Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks.
The musician personnel is a changeable thing during a CamPac season, and the stage population at Hahn Hall varies from nine for the October 29 program of Beethoven (Hammerklavier sonata), Mozart, and Chopin to three musicians for the November 21 roster. That program gamely shifts from the stuffy stuff of Rachmaninoff to music of Armenian composer Arno Babajanian and lesser-known items from Icelandic composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir (former member of the Iceland band Sigur Rós). For more information, see cameratapacifica.org.
Head over the 154 for more chamber music worth savoring thanks to the Santa Ynez Valley Concert Series, now up to its 45th annual season (formerly known as “Schoolhouse Music,” a nod to Los Olivos’s Dunn School). This fall, in its atmospherically clement home of the St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley Episcopal Church in Los Olivos, the series — headed up by and sometimes featuring pianist Robert Cassidy — kicks off with An Evening of Brahms Chamber Music (Oct. 11) and continues with Seraph Brass on November 4. For more information, see smitv.org/syv-concert-series.html.
A welcome, new-ish addition to Santa Barbara’s classical “concert season” is the Music Academy of the West, which, in the past three years, has broken from its erstwhile summer-timed program to give us a few tasty evenings under the umbrella of the Mariposa Series. Last year’s four-concert program, spread out over several months, was especially strong (my favorite being the JACK Quartet), and the upward tradition continues in the 2025-26 list.
Fittingly, the Prometheus Quartet, formed at Julliard in 2023 and MAW’s first “Emerging Artists String Quartet,” brings a program of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and young composer (and former Academy guest artist) Caroline Shaw to Hahn Hall on October 17. Academy faculty pianist of note Conor Hanick joins alum clarinetist Gerbrich Meijer at the Hahn on November 19. Dipping into 2026, watch for the power trio of Tessa Lark, Joshua Roman, and Edgar Meyer — doing up music of Bach and Meyer — on January 8, and the New York Philharmonic String Quartet on April 2 and 3.
The Music Academy. It’s not just for summer anymore. For more information, see musicacademy.org.
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