4Q’s: Z.E.N. Trio

Pianist Zhang Zuo, violinist Esther Yoo, and cellist Narek Hakhnazaryan met as BBC New Generation Artists in 2015, and hit it off so well they decided to continue working together as a piano trio for chamber music concerts as The Z.E.N. Trio, employing their first initials as an acronym. Since the three are all also standout solo musicians – Hakhnazaryan won Cello First Prize and Gold Medal at the XIV International Tchaikovsky Competition in 2011, a year earlier Yoo became the youngest prizewinner of the 10th International Sibelius Violin Competition at age 16 and she made her L.A. Phil debut just last year, and Zuo’s accomplishments include playing solo recitals at the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center, among many others – finding time to connect has been a challenge, although they managed to record an album two years ago, and to conduct tours in Europe and China as well as residencies at the Aspen Festival. But this fall brings Z.E.N.’s first North American appearances in multiple cities, six in all, with Santa Barbara by far the smallest.

The trio will perform Schubert’s Notturno in E-flat Major, op. 148; Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67; an arrangement of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise; and Armenian composer Arno Babajanian’s Piano Trio at Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall on Tuesday, October 22. Yoo clued us in on the trio ethos and take on the program over the phone from her home in Brussels earlier this week.

Q. What drew you to each other to form the trio outside of the BBC?

A. Fate had us put together for a recording for the BBC Radio, but we all really got along so well musically and personally, and the sessions and rehearsals went so smoothly, with easy communicating that we became friends from then on. We all value the importance of chamber music. It really enhances a way of thinking about music, the way we listen, and respond to each other. It benefits our solo work because we’re always discovering new ways of playing.

What’s Zen about the Z.E.N. Trio?

The idea just showed up at first. But it feels like the right word for us because we have a real sense of harmony. Of course with any intense relationship it’s not Zen all the time. But the way we manage to work through difficult things, and communicate with each other with acceptance and respect is also great. We’re friends first, and we have a lot of willingness to learn from each other, and a shared commitment to approach music with a beginner’s mind. So it’s a name that ties us together. 

How did the program come together?

The Schubert is simplistic and a very calm and sweet piece that is so contrasting to the rest of the program. The atmosphere changes with the Shostakovich, who is one of my favorite composers. It’s that Russian school that we love and are familiar with, and it suits us because it’s music that we’ve known since our childhood, so that language that feels very familiar. We know our way around so we really enjoy figuring out and discovering even more. The Rachmaninoff is an arrangement by Narek’s mother, and we end with the Babajanian, which is not part of the core piano trio repertoire so most people aren’t familiar with it. But when you hear it, you’ll realize how wonderful it is. It’s a fantastic trio with so much going on, very Armenian. Narek showed us the ropes of how to approach it. 

Turning to your solo career, the world these days is rife with brilliant young female violinists. How do you set yourself apart?

That was a concern I dwelled upon over the past few years. There was a time that I was thinking too much about how to stand out, and do things differently just for the sake of it. But at a certain point, it became counterproductive. We forget that as individuals we are already different and unique. Everyone plays slightly differently. So now I prioritize more discovering who I am and what I want to say through my music, organically. And I think that’s enough. I don’t need to fake it or create something that isn’t true to me. I just want to follow what I love and what I want to share.

Symphony in Harmony

The opening concert of the Santa Barbara Symphony’s 2019-20 season is sure to warm the cockles of its charismatic conductor Nir Kabaretti, the Israeli-born musician with an Italian-sounding last name whose extensive operatic experience includes several productions at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence and Teatro alla Scala in Milan.

The ensemble will launch its series of monthly concerts at the Granada on October 19-20 with “Festa Italiana!”, opening with famed composer Verdi’s overture to his mid-career La Forza del Destino before critically acclaimed violinist Francesca Dego performs Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Post-intermission the symphony will play Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Capriccio Italien, composed during a three-month sojourn in Rome in 1880, before closing the Italian-themed program with Mendelssohn’s Sym-phony No. 4.

The weekend’s performances also represent the beginning of a new, four-year collective bargaining agreement with the union representing more than 75 orchestral musician positions, including pay rate increases that represent an investment in the ensemble’s continued artistic quality in a competitive L.A. area market. Kabaretti, who was named the orchestra’s music director in 2006 and artistic director two years later, received a new contract of his own last year.

Half a Century of Community Concerts

Santa Barbara Music Club marks a major milestone with its new season that begins this Saturday, October 19, with a concert by pianist Betty Oberacker, one of the community organization’s longest tenured members. The first six concerts of the season will be performed at First United Methodist Church, a few blocks from its home for many years at the Library’s Faulkner Gallery (where concerts will resume starting in February), one of the more recent changes for SBMC, which grew from basically a tea party in private homes to a presenting entity that counts a majority of professional musicians among its constituents, although accomplished amateurs are also always welcome.

Oberacker – a UCSB professor emeritus and revered solo and chamber music pianist who toured throughout Europe, Israel, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and the U.S., including performances at Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and Berlin Philharmonic Hall – will play the program “Apotheosis,” including two preludes and fugues from J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: C major, BWV 870, and in F-sharp minor, BWV 882, and his Italian Concerto, BWV 971, before being joined by clarinetist David Singer for Brahms’ Sonata in F Minor, Op. 120/1. As always, admission is free. Visit https://sbmusicclub.org.

A ‘Dream’ in Blue

Think of Luis Muñoz’s new album The Infinite Dream as the nexus between his last two recordings – 2015’s Voz, which found the Costa Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist working exclusively with singers for the first time in his then 30-year recording career, and 2017’s The Dead Man, which represented a return to instrumental music but much more meditative as it used a poem about a farm worker facing his imminent death after a lethal accident as a springboard to express Muñoz’s visceral reaction to the election of President Trump.

The new record features Muñoz’s most frequent group of the last five years, featuring core Santa Barbara members Dan Zimmerman on guitars, Brendan Statom on basses, Jonathan Dane on trumpet, and George Friedenthal, its newest member, on keyboards. So it’s not a stretch at least sonically to say that Dream in a way represents what Dead Man might have been if Muñoz had put metaphorical words to his thoughts at the time. But it also indicates a truly giant step forward, a maturation of the composer’s musical vision and an astonishing display of subtlety with lyrics full of nuanced imagery and mystical messages.

That’s largely the result of its impetus: Muñoz’s desire to craft an entire album of songs for the Santa Barbara-based Guyanese singer Lois Mahalia. She imbues the words with often breathy vocals that emerge slowly, as if she were caressing the syllables as much as singing them, lingering on phrases to coax myriad levels of depth and meaning. Seldom have we heard such subtlety from the singer more familiar to local audiences for belting out R&B and soul songs in a band with her brothers at such venues as the Biltmore’s Ty Lounge here in Montecito, or backing up Santa Barbara superstar singer-songwriters Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.

“I wrote it with Lois’ voice in mind,” Muñoz explained earlier this week. “I’ve had vocal songs on most of my albums, at least one, but this time I thought that she’s such a jewel of a singer, a beautiful songstress, that I wanted to do an entire project with her. All the material was written for Lois to sing.”

Muñoz, whose main instrument is percussion, normally relies heavily on Latin jazz and other South or Central American influences. But Infinite Dream is much slower and sultry than any of its predecessors in his nine-album catalog, more reliant on ballads.

“It was more Joni Mitchell meets Sade that I had in mind, along with other singers,” Muñoz agreed. “I’ve been doing this for so many years, you learn to borrow and steal from everybody, from Bali to Argentina to the American south.”

But it’s also the subject matter that informs the project.

“It’s a very personal record. I wrote it in a dream state of beauty but also in the reality of getting in touch with your own mortality,” explained Muñoz, who officially released the album back in August on his 65th birthday. “It’s time to get rid of all the BS that society surrounds us with, or that we do to ourselves, all that worthless stuff. Get to the essence of human existence and those existential qualities of life and death, having and living your purpose, and how to better the world.”

But to be sure, The Infinite Dream doesn’t ignore the difficulties of everyday life, the struggles and the strife sometimes just to get by, and issues beyond the individual. On “Shame,” Muñoz indicts mankind for its apathy in the face of terrible human and environmental tragedies: “The fool is blinded by the veil / of dreams of gold and scripture’s tales / as Mother Earth takes one last breath / Man keeps on nourishing his death.”

“People don’t care, or they naively think it’s going to be OK,” the composer said. “They don’t seem to be awakened, their priorities are mixed up. And I’m like that too. It’s a direct commentary on the state of society.”

Another of society’s scourge – the opiate crisis – gets addressed in “In Blood at Midnight,” which Muñoz described as a dialogue between a mother and her heroin-addicted daughter.

“But on the other hand I wrote about hope, desires and the fragility of peace,” Muñoz noted. “The album was written with the duality of suffering, mortality and the tragedy of human existence, but also the deep desire of approaching and seeing life from the perspective of light and hope. It’s a dream that’s infinite in its optimism despite all these horrible things we’re going through on this planet. I choose the light, the positive aspect.”

Indeed, that’s the impact in total of the album, which shimmers in its beauty and the apparent symbiosis between composer Muñoz and singer Mahalia. Because, remarkably, the collaboration only began in the studio.

“I’m very egocentric, a complete control freak when it comes to the music,” he admitted. “I need to develop it, all the details, arrange it, produce it, write the lyrics, determine the instrumentation. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to let go of any of that.”

What he has been able to let go of is living in Santa Barbara, a residency that began 45 years ago when the percussionist attended UCSB. But the first concert since the album’s release takes place this Friday, October 18, at the Lobero Theatre, only Muñoz’s third appearance at the former opera house over that span. Mahalia will be joined as vocalist by the longtime Santa Barbara-based Brazilian bossa nova singer-guitarist Teka for the official farewell show, although the composer has so far only de-camped to Oxnard, with Arizona or Costa Rica on the near horizon. The band will play selections from the last several albums and perform The Infinite Dream in its entirety.

“It’s more of a gathering of friends for me to say farewell to them by giving them the only thing I have, which is my music,” Muñoz said. “This city offered me its support and love for many decades. The least I can do it give them the very best of me one last time through my music.”