Santa Barbara’s live music calendar leans into pop music year-round, whereas the classical music calendar — an especially strong part of our town’s cultural life — generally follows the October to early August plan.
As of last week, classical music burst forth with all due intensity, with strong entries from the Santa Barbara classical music hunting season’s opener, the Music Academy of the West’s “Mariposa” series, followed by the UCSB Arts & Lectures — hosted recital by no less a household name celebrity than Lang Lang at the Granada, and a season-kicker from the upstart Santa Barbara Chamber Players.
Serious music fans will want to keep their calendars inked next week, with the arrival of the Santa Barbara Symphony, Camerata Pacifica, Sérgio and Clarice Assad, and humble jazz guitarist Julian Lage, who will keep us on the streets and listening.
Mariposa on the March
From what we understand, the Music Academy of the West’s “Mariposa” series, which launched last week in Hahn Hall, has a two-fold objective. First, the series offers a valuable opportunity for alums of this prestigious institution to return and share their wares after attaining a certain status in the professional classical world. On another front, these concerts, which take place in the so-called “off season” of the dense summer-timed Academy festival, give us in the listening community cultural edification and something juicy to dig our ears into in the other months.
Both objectives were met last week, when violist Richard O’Neill — a fellow here in 1998 and ’99 and now well established as part of the Takács Quartet and more in the global classical world — met pianist and alum status tenderfoot August Baik, an Academy fellow only last summer.
Of particular interest was the engagingly daring program on Thursday, mostly before intermission. The first sound we heard was Pete Seeger, via a recording from his 1957 album American Industrial Ballads, a folkloric source that maverick composer Frederic Rzewski then deftly deconstructed and exploded as part of his North American Ballads project. Baik took on Rzewski’s rangy blend of genre fragments, abrupt modulations, and smirks of dissonance, along with touches of swing and a final focused statement of the song in question.
The program features dramatic variations on an older, more conventional theme, continuing with Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae, which updates and reshuffles Renaissance composer John Dowland’s original, also appearing only at the end. Likewise, in Baik’s original composition cycle — given its world premiere here — a wildly popular Korean tune from the folk opera Chunhyang-jeon shows up intact at the score’s end. Leading up to that infectious, “leave ‘em humming” melody is an inviting, enigmatic tracery of musical invention for piano and viola.
Post-intermission, it was time to settle down into something old and crowd-pleasing, a k a Rachmaninoff time. In a bit of full-circle narrative-making, O’Neill explained he played this work during an emotionally fraught period. While at the Academy, legendary and late-blooming viola teacher Don McInnes urged him on, and the rest is history for O’Neill.
The pair of alums fared well with Rachmaninoff’s overripe romantic language, but that music felt flat after the excitement and inventiveness of the first half. “Mariposa” touches down at Hahn Hall three more times before the launch of the summer-consuming MAW festival — season number 80! Coming next, on November 10, is a program called Humor & Harmony, with the duo of cellist Nicholas Canellakis and Michael Stephen Brown.
More information here.
‘If It’s Tuesday’ Syndrome, Chamber Orchestrally Speaking
While enjoying the Santa Barbara Chamber Players (SBCP) concert on Saturday night, I kept figuratively checking my calendar to remind myself it was not a Tuesday night. Tuesday nights at the Lobero represented a well-established tradition for the Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra (1978-2017, RIP), long under maestro Heiichiro Ohyama, from whose ashes the Chamber Players have emerged. It’s great to have at least a facsimile of the SBCO experience back in town, if only a few times per year.
Opening its fourth season in the welcoming space of Trinity Lutheran Church, the SBCP started strong, programmatically and musically. Wielding the conducting baton is the young and dynamic Daniel Gee, who leads Westmont music programs and was recently seen conducting the Santa Barbara Youth Symphony at Hahn Hall, as part of the Brave New Works symposium.
At Trinity Lutheran, the concert’s centerpiece was the powerful Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1, robustly played by Polish cellist Jakub Omsky. The other main event came after intermission, with a solid reading of Mozart’s greatest symphony, the 40th in G minor, and the concert opened with a welcome rarity from composer Fanny Hensel (a k a sister of Felix Mendelssohn). Hensel qualifies as an early woman composer, squelched in her early 19th-century day, an especially male-dominated era, but who is getting some overdue attention in recent years. Her luminous Overture in C, heard at Trinity, validated the growing spotlight on a local basis.
All told, it was like old SBCO home week, minus the Lobero’s inimitable ambiance. Catch the SBCP wave when it returns in January.
On The Grand on State
It is becoming a habitual Granada-Grand-and-back ritual. I was busy being bedazzled by pianist Lang Lang at a recital at The Granada Theatre last Friday night, but during intermission, I was lured next door to The Grand on State jazz club by the news and the S.B. buzz. So, after Lang’s take on Beethoven’s magnificent Piano Sonata Opus 110, I felt obliged, for love of jazz and the proximity to good music, to check out the fine L.A.-based jazz vocalist Janis Mann. Amid her Carmen McRae that night, before a packed house, she was nestled in the balladic bath of Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” via Jon Hendrick’s lyric, and her estimable pianist Andy Langham was going to town, eloquently. Then, out walked Joe to the Lang recital in progress. It was a multicultural, multi-genre moment in the 1200 block of State Street.
Next for The Grand on State, bold pianist Tamir Hendelman, who backed the great vocalist Roberta Gambarini in this room last month, returns with his own trio and a Bill Evans tribute on Friday night (see Jim Buckley’s story here).
TO-DOINGS:
As mentioned at the top of the column, the prospects for a good time in the pursuit of serious music are strong in the coming weeks. Tonight, October 15, marks the launch of Camerata Pacifica’s new season, a fairly tame program compared to what’s to come, but undoubtedly strong in the music-making department. Saturday, October 24, and Sunday, October 25, belong to concert number one for the Santa Barbara Symphony’s 2026-27 season (Independent story here).
Crossing over between classical, jazz, and Brazilian sounds, classical guitar master Sérgio Assad will be joined next Wednesday at Campbell Hall by his rising composer-pianist daughter, Clarice (Independent story here). Jazz fans won’t want to miss lyrical jazz guitarist Julian Lage at the Lobero on Thursday, October 22.Lage has hit this stage before with Gary Burton and Charles Lloyd. Still, he’s finally on the marquee himself with his fascinating current project featuring organist-pianist John Medeski (see Independent story here).
For something almost completely different, consider heading out to UCSB this weekend to catch a student-created and performed production, A Legacy of Stone: The Musical at Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall from Friday through Sunday. A report from the front explains that it is “an original, entirely student-run musical reimagining the story of Medusa,” with music, lyrics, and book by Chelsea-Cameron Hastings. Dance, original music, and a live, student-embodied orchestra support the project as part of an arts coalition known as Shrunken Head. Curiosity is duly piqued.
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