Tag archives: Adrian Spence
Camerata Pacifica’s season closer was a blending of Phillip Glass’s repetitive structures in composition with classical artist Frank Zappa’s use of sampling music as background topped by key instruments in a composition. A few works had audible hints of a Lydian diminished scale combined with an auxiliary blues diminished mode in a contemporary classical resolve […]
The 34th season for Camerata Pacifica was celebrated with a Director’s Cut event at a private club in Goleta on Monday, September 11. The focus was the formal introduction of its new Executive Director Ana Papakhian by its founder and Artistic Director Adrian Spence. There was also a lovely meet and greet with four of […]
In announcing its 2023-24 and 34th season programming, Camerata Pacifica’s founder and Artistic Director Adrian Spence delightedly shared the appointment of Ana Papakhian as its new executive director. Papakhian is well-known in the classical music world here, and I would add nationally as well, with 27 years of experience in the field, most recently as […]
Adrian Spence’s Camerata Pacifica, which is celebrating its 33rd season, put on a doozy of a show at the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall. Yura Lee, a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, mesmerized on both violin and viola with her frenzied renditions of Kodály’s “Sonata for Solo Cello in B Minor,” specially […]
Maison Mineards Montecito has been particularly busy of late with a German TV crew interviewing me in the garden, phone calls from the London Evening Standard and Daily Mail, and last week hosting a TV crew from France’s TF1 for its 16-year-old show, 50 Minutes Inside. After being interviewed outside Pierre Lafond by producer Sarah […]
Condor Express owner Hiroko Benko made sure everyone had a whale of a time when she hosted a sunset cruise for her good friend Dolores Johnson, organizer of the Montecito Motor Classic at the Santa Barbara Polo Club, which attracted more than 200 exotic and luxury cars. “It was a truly wonderful event,” gushed Hiroko, […]
Prior to the pandemic, Camerata Pacifica wasn’t really looking for an excuse to do some tweaking to its approach. After all, the chamber music ensemble had grown over its 30 years from performing sporadic concerts at a single small stage in town to largely selling out an eight-show season at four venues from Santa Barbara […]
Camerata Pacifica began life almost 30 years ago as the Bach Camerata, a tribute to the famed Baroque composer whose music they frequently performed, including multiple concerts of the Brandenburg Concertos. But even before the Santa Barbara-based chamber music organization changed to its current moniker right around the time it marked its first decade, the […]