Requiem for Oberacker

The 2024-25 classical music season actually gets underway this weekend via an early start for the Santa Barbara Music Club, who are congregating to present a concert in memory of Betty Oberacker. The longtime Santa Barbara-based, internationally-known concert pianist, educator and coach passed away June 28 at the age of 91. 

“Betty was a tremendous musician, full of great stories about the famous people she had worked with, and she was always coming up with ideas and innovations for SBMC,” said Eric Valinsky, the pianist who has maintained dual careers in computer systems architecture and music for decades and is the immediate past president of the Music Club. “She was also always a teacher, and when we first played together I just wanted to rehearse, not have a piano lesson. But everything she said was so useful, and it got to the point where every time I play the piano now, I hear her voice and it has me playing better than I ever have.” 

Valinsky will be one of the SBMC musicians who will perform at the free tribute concert at 3 pm on Sunday, August 11, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (4575 Auhay Dr.), with a program of music that Oberacker played and/or loved. Valinsky will perform the “Italian Concerto”by Bach (“Her favorite composer,” he said),join flutist Jane Hahn for Fauré’s “Morceau de Concours”and Nicole McKenzie for Mozart’s “Violin Sonata in C major, K. 298.” The Mozart sonata has special significance as Oberacker performed the piece in her final concert concluding 20 years with the Music Club on March 2. 

Rounding out the memorial program, Steven Hodson, Westmont’s Director of Piano Studies, will play Liszt’s “Consolations” while former Westmont collaborative piano faculty member Pascal Saloman will take on two Impromptus by Schubert, another Oberacker favorite. A reception with the artists follows the concert. 

In a strange twist of fate, Oberacker’s colleague, the composer-organist-educator Emma Lou Diemer also died in June at the age of 96. The former UCSB Music Department faculty members who started at the university in the early 1970s knew each other well for half a century – Diemer composed her “Piano Concerto in One Movement” for Oberacker in 1992. Their twin passing in the same month this summer is an inestimable loss for the local piano community. 

“It was awful. I was devastated,” Valinsky said. “They were both such inspirations. I just had to take some days off.” 

SBMC will also pay tribute to Diemer in its February 8 concert at First United Methodist Church. Visit https://sbmusicclub.org for more information.