American Grain Meets German Grandeur

Over many years of the practice, it has become a summer ritual on Santa Barbara’s musical calendar: the meeting of the Academy Festival Orchestra (AFO). It’s akin to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, minus the animal agitation. As part of its perennial master plan, the Music Academy of the West (MAW) launches its much-appreciated series of orchestral concerts, featuring its Academy Festival Orchestra, at The Granada Theatre at the end of June and beginning of July. 

This year, the launch date landed in the run-up to the Fourth of July, with an aptly designed program last Friday. On this night, the AFO dove into the delicious jazz-meets-classical pageantry of Gershwin’s An American in Paris, topped off by the comfy-chair Germanic sounds of Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. As usual, the caliber of this young orchestra — which had convened as an ensemble only three days prior — was astonishingly strong. Academy fellows may technically be students, but they have already reached a high level of musicianship, capable of cohering into a bold and mature orchestral sound.

Conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya did the honors of the inaugural grooming of the orchestra, a task handled for years by the accomplished Larry Rachleff, who died in 2002 and to whom this concert was dedicated, by MAW chief Shauna Quill. Harth-Bedoya, a Peruvian conductor presently the head of orchestras and conducting studies at Houston’s Rice University (where Rachleff taught), led the fresh charges with precision-gearing and calibrated passions to suit the scores. 

American in Paris is on speed dial when it comes to programming classic American repertoire. Still, it’s always a welcome visitor when played with the crispness and vibrancy the AFO channeled into it. It’s landing on a big holiday weekend — America’s Semiquincentennial, no less — only enhanced its propitious power here. 

The score remains an ideal example of American musical character literally fueled by European musical influence, and Gershwin’s experience of the streets of Paris after scoring his success with European audiences and critics with Rhapsody in Blue in 1924. These works were broadly appreciated, seminal experiments in the willful blending of classical and jazz sensibilities, although Darius Milhaud’s La Création du monde, from 1923, preceded them.

At the Granada, we were greeted by the balm of the familiar, opening with the festive blast of upbeat energy, with melodic motive tossed into a Gershwinian blender and subjected to ever-shifting fragmentation processing. Deeper into the score, a loping, cowpoke-y section with a bluesy theme injects further suggestions of Americanness into the work, but without undoing the underlying Euro-phonic values the composer embedded in the piece. He was straddling worlds and continents, in a way true to the title. 

The piece is more modernist in spirit and design than it’s often given credit for. True, there are infectious melodic turns aplenty, but it is a restlessly moveable feast, which also makes it more of a challenge to orchestral forces than might be expected. All was delivered, clean and steamed, with the exactitude and youthful verve we’ve come to expect from the AFO. 

In the Brahms symphony, a summery affair by the composer’s standards (literally composed in the summertime), with a blithe and breezy opening section easing into one of the score’s several signature themes, this one a swaying waltz. A rousing theme and dynamic heft bring the opus to a close. Here, the orchestra also fared boldly, if slipping in transparency and silk in the strings in some moments. Overall, the AFO, under Harth-Bedoya’s hand, brought the score to life with gusto.

In short, Friday’s inspiring concert suggests that we’re in for a good run of orchestral concerts this summer — all on the properly celebratory night of Saturday from here on out. This time out, the celebratory blowout of Independence Day got an early, symphonic start.