At the opening of Camerata Pacifica’s April concert, Adrian Spence assured the audience that there would be no difficult music on the program, just lots of “vacuous virtuosity.” The musicians then played Cafe Concertino by the Australian composer Carl Vine, a work for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano that is based on a formidably intricate scheme for creating tonal ambiguity-just the kind of academic exercise Spence claimed to have foresworn.
Richard Kaufman led the Santa Barbara Symphony for this pops tribute to the music of the Beatles, joined by Classical Mystery Tour, a successful Beatles cover band with a unique angle: They perform the Beatles’ music exactly as it was written, but with the assistance of various symphony orchestras around the world. The concept originated with Jim Owen, who has sung and played the part of John Lennon in the Broadway musical Beatlemania! and in other Beatle bands since the early ’80s.
On Tuesday, April 24 the audience at the Arlington Theatre will time-travel through a full century of Broadway’s greatest hits, courtesy of New York composer and arranger Neil Berg and his 100 Years of Broadway concert. I spoke with Berg last week about the show.
The Indy‘s arts editor Charles Donelan reports on his second year in a row at Miami’s Winter Music Conference.
There were so many singers onstage with the Santa Barbara Symphony for this performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem that it took a while for all of them to reach their places. It was beautiful to watch the rows of eager faces gradually fill five deep to the top, and a thrill to then see their 148 music books open in unison at a signal from the podium.
Camerata Pacifica pushed the programming envelope on Friday by putting the intermission before the first piece.
Santa Barbara takes on a slew of the greatest living American playwrights this spring, with major productions of works by Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Lee Blessing, and Richard Greenberg. There’s also something by an Englishman named Shakespeare, and two important American premieres of contemporary plays from Finland.
With this concert falling on a St. Patrick’s Saturday night, the mood was festive and the theme was green, with young soloist Natasha Paremski appearing in an elegant emerald gown. First up was the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11 of Frederic Chopin.
1) They have great judges. Year in and year out, the Arts Fund taps the most visionary and impartial people in town to judge the entries.
Singers and songs provide the inspiration for many of this spring’s most promising classical concerts. The Santa Barbara Master Chorale has a major performance coming up, as does the Santa Barbara Choral Society, which will join the Westmont College Choir and the Santa Barbara Symphony for Brahms’s majestic Requiem.
