Tag archives: Music Academy
Piano faculty member Jerome Lowenthal figured he’d wrapped up his half-century at the Music Academy when he was the star of MA’s 2019 Opening Night Gala, “Honoring a Legend,” a densely packed evening that featured a cocktail reception, a performance at Hahn Hall curated by Lowenthal that featured a series of MA alumni pianists from […]
Milt and Arlene Larsen opened the doors of their former club, the Magic Castle, to let the public know that the space by the Bird Refuge is now available for rental. Sarah Anticouni’s Groovy Vintage Clothing is already leasing space in the property, the former Cafe del Sol, so guests, including Alan and Lisa Parsons, […]
When Jennifer Kloetzel steps on stage at Lehmann Hall to perform as part of the Music Academy’s All-Star Cello Choir in the final concert of the new Mariposa series on December 17, it will be the first time the cellist has appeared on campus under the Academy’s aegis since she was a second-time summer student […]
Jeanette Fantone, a Japanese Filipino animator from Carpinteria, has won a 2022 Princess Grace Award. Her work largely stems from cultural nostalgia and gravitas towards the manipulation of textures and tactility as a way of invoking impressions of memory. Fantone received her BFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts this year and competed three films in […]
“My favorite thing is having all the fellows show up to a rehearsal and not know what’s going to happen,” Artistic and Creative Director James Darrah told me this summer in an interview during the leadup for Hahn Hall 1922-2022: An Original Cabaret. He continued, “It also helps highlight where you can push and everyone […]
The Music Academy launches its new season of projecting Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD series at the recently technically upgraded Hahn Hall with Luigi Cherubini’s rarely performed Medea, with Met soprano star Sondra Radvanovsky as the mythic sorceress who will stop at nothing in her quest for vengeance. The Met-premiere production recorded live transmission at […]
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 […]
Music Academy (they lopped off “of the West” from the name this summer) doesn’t just have a new moniker, they’ve also created a brand-new series to continue the celebration of its milestone 75th year. Think of the new Mariposa Series as “homecoming” recitals held on campus to showcase what Academy alumni and faculty are up […]
Even the cavernous stage of the venerable Granada Theatre was filled to capacity when 170 performers helped launch the Santa Barbara Symphony’s 70th season with Carl Orff’s magnificent Carmina Burana featuring Rodney Gustafson’s State Street Ballet, Santa Barbara Choral Society under Jo Anne Wasserman, the Quire of Voyces under director Nathan Kreitzer, and the Music […]
The Santa Barbara Symphony last presented Carmina Burana just seven years ago, but, says music and artistic director Nir Kabaretti, the time is ripe to launch its new season with an even bigger community cultural collaborative effort in presenting the Carl Orff classic cantata composed in the mid-1930s based on 24 poems drawn from a […]
Social gridlock reigned at the Music Academy when Santa Barbara Beautiful staged its 58th annual award celebration with 200 guests at the Kuehn Court reception with wandering musical troubadours Ted Hoagland, Chris Judge, and Collin Richardson. The awards celebration was staged in the Lehman Ballroom, emceed by ubiquitous KEYT-TV reporter John Palminteri, with a welcome […]
The 2022 Music Academy Summer Festival came to a close on Saturday night with the symphony-vocal extravaganza at the Granada. Coming up next: three different recitals from the five fellows who claimed top prize in the musical competitions, plus perhaps a new product from the winner of the Music Academy Innovation Institute’s 2022 Fast Pitch […]
The Music Academy wrapped up its 75th anniversary summer festival in fine form at the Granada when alumna Italian Speranza Scappucci conducted the Academy Festival Orchestra. With the hugely entertaining program including Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” “The Pines of Rome” by Respighi, and vocal works by Donizetti, Verdi, Gounod, Bizet, Serrano, Chapi, and Puccini, the […]
As its 75th anniversary season winds down, the Music Academy’s Academy Festival Orchestra under conductor Stéphane Denève was in fine form at the Granada. The entertaining concert featured Ravel’s masterpiece “Daphnis et Chloe Suite No. 2” and Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3.” Frenchman Denève, music director of the St. Louis Symphony and the Brussels Philharmonic, was […]
The Music Academy created its first-ever directing fellow position this summer, and chose Canadian Sawyer Ann Craig, who has a degree from McGill and credits as both a singer and director all over Canada. Craig had the chance to work alongside the directors of each of the vocal performance events, including Sara Widzer, Peter Kazaras, […]
Composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery is no stranger to Santa Barbara, having performed several times in the intimate Mary Craig Auditorium at the downtown Museum of Art with the Catalyst Quartet, the Grammy Award-winning string foursome from the Sphinx Organization she spearheaded from 2012-20. But that was before George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter-spurred reckoning with […]
Don’t walk into the Music Academy’s Cabaret at Hahn Hall next Thursday, July 28, expecting to see a knockoff of the 1966 Kander and Ebb Broadway musical or Bob Fosse’s 50-year-old film adaptation. While both are set in Berlin’s cabaret culture during the Weimar Republic, the Academy event is an originally devised cabaret with a […]
We were all clearly in the right aria when the Music Academy staged Tchaikovsky’s classic Eugene Onegin at the Granada, directed by Peter Kazaras, head of Opera UCLA. With the orchestra under Slovenian-born conductor Daniela Candillari, Yale-educated baritone Samuel Kidd as Onegin, and soprano Johanna Will as his lover, they were absolutely superb in the […]
With all due respect to Opera Santa Barbara, the opera event of the year may well take place this weekend when the Music Academy (MA) mounts an original and fully-staged production of Tchaikovsky’s popular and beloved opera Eugene Onegin at the Granada on Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Especially if Peter Kazaras’ direction comes close […]
Sō Percussion’s mission, which is both straightforward and very ambitious, is to serve as a “percussion-based music organization that creates and presents new collaborative works to adventurous and curious audiences and educational initiatives to engaged students… in order to exemplify the power of music to unite people and forge deep social bonds. Pretty much all […]
