Symphonic Triplets

Magnificent classical music reigned supreme with three impressive concerts in our Eden by the Beach, two at the venerable Granada and one at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall.

Kicking off the week was the Community Arts Music Association’s first concert of the new year with London’s 79-year-old Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko, music director since 2021. This was their 14th visit to Santa Barbara since 1963 when the orchestra was led by the legendary Sir Malcolm Sargent.

It was the second stop of an 11-city tour featuring pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason, who I last saw perform with her cellist brother Sheku at a UCSB Arts & Lectures event at Campbell Hall last year. He gained worldwide fame after performing at Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 2018.

Kanneh-Mason was very much at the top of her game, deftly playing Prokofiev’s 28-minute work, “Concerto No. 3 in C Major,” after the highly entertaining program launched with Debussy’s Danse.

It concluded with Rachmaninoff’s “Symphony No. 2 in E Minor,” one of his gloomier compositions, and an encore of Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov’s Suite from Raymonda, including the “Dance of the Arab Boys” and “Entry of the Saracens.”

A truly majestic performance.

Just 72 hours later it was time for the Santa Barbara Symphony, under maestro Nir Kabaretti, to shine brightly with a 13-piece opera themed show The Ride of the Valkyries, hosted by trained opera singer and KEYT-TV meteorologist Anikka Abbott, which left us anything but under the weather.

The two-hour show included four soloists from Opera Santa Barbara – soprano Karin Wolverton, baritone Timothy Mix, mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel, and tenor Harold Meers – singing works from Verdi, Dvořák, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Rossini, Puccini, Mascagni, Offenbach, and German composer Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, with the “Ride of the Valkyries” its signature piece.

I first heard it played at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London in 1970 as part of the full five-hour production, during which my music master Michael Nicholas, who later went on to be choirmaster and organist at Norwich Cathedral in East Anglia, fell fast asleep!

Kostis Protopapas, artistic director of Opera SB, also took over the conducting daïs, to perform works from Verdi’s Il trovatore, a story of superstition, revenge and ill-fated love, which the company is presenting at the Lobero next month (Feb.) starring many of the principals on the Granada stage.

Wrapping up the tony triumvirate of shows was Camerata Pacifica’s first performance of 2024 at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall with the four-part program debuting South Korean-born violinist YuEun Gemma Kim with veteran cellist Ani Aznavoorian, and pianist Gilles Vonsattel playing Mendelssohn’s beloved “Piano Trio in D Minor.”

Brahms’ “Clarinet Sonata in E Flat Major” with multi-award winning Spaniard Jose Franch-Ballester on woodwind with Vonsattel again on keyboard was followed by French-Slovenian composer Vinko Globokar’s “?Corporel,” in which the performer Ji Hye Jung used her body as an instrument. The concert concluded with Christos Hatzis’ “Fertility Rites,” reflecting on the Canada-based composer’s engagement with Inuit culture on the marimba and tape.

An extraordinary week with extraordinary world-class musicians.