State Street Ballet closes out its 30th season with The Brilliance Program: Balanchine, Arpino, and Beyond, a title meant to characterize the works featured on the May 9-10 performances at the Lobero Theatre – but also apropos for the company’s spectacular season, the first full one under the leadership of Artistic Director Megan Phillips and […]
The Music Academy of the West season is still a solid six weeks away when 150 fellows will arrive on the Miraflores campus in Montecito and, alongside 60 faculty members, collaborate in creating a truly astonishing slate of events over the otherwise fallow months on the classical calendar. There are nearly 125 in-person opportunities in […]
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Fans of talented teens singing and dancing in school versions of Broadway musicals rejoice this time of spring, as each of the major public high schools mounts their big musicals of the year. Hadestown, which winds up its run at Santa Barbara High May 1-3, has already had two productions by teen companies in town […]
After years of periodic collaborations with Santa Barbara choirs alone or in various combinations, the Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus makes its debut with the orchestra’s April 25-26 pair of concerts. The ensemble was assembled as something akin to an all-star choir, comprised of community choral singers from many other organizations, including Adelfos Ensemble, Santa Barbara […]
When State Street Ballet founding artistic/executive director Rodney Gustafson fully retired at the end of 2023, the destiny of the company – founded by the former American Ballet Theatre dancer some three decades earlier – was something of an unknown. Things seemed to be in good hands with the twin appointments of Megan Philipp as […]
Owls, a New York-based string quartet collective, wooed the audience at the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall with their original, visceral performance, part of UCSB Arts and Lectures. The entertaining foursome, which unusually included two cellists rather than two violinists – Gabriel Cabezas and Paul Wiancko, violist Ayane Kozasa, and violinist Alexi Kenney […]
Russian pianist Yefim Bronfman, 66, playing in our Eden by the Beach for the first time in more than 25 years, showed off his technical brilliance to the full. Bronfman, who studied at Juilliard in New York and the Curtis Institute of Music, was part of the CAMA Masterseries, having won an Avery Fisher Prize […]
Around these parts, George Frideric Handel’s Messiah generally gets performed only in December, in advance of Christmas, frequently as a sing-along or featuring just the famous “Hallelujah” chorus, and always as it was written in English. This weekend, the Santa Barbara Choral Society is rolling out the beloved oratorio. This most familiar of choral pieces […]
Pianist-actor-playwright-producer Hershey Felder has appeared on stages across the world more than 6,000 times in original works focused on a single famous composer. His works include George Gershwin Alone, Beethoven, Maestro Bernstein, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, Our Great Tchaikovsky, and A Paris Love Story – Debussy. A few of his similar filmed creations have […]
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Out of the Box, the local theater company that has been producing alternative contemporary musical theater for 15 years, soars all the way up into the heavens for its next show, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. Dave Malloy’s genre-defying musical adaptation of a scandalous 70-page segment from Tolstoy‘s famed 1869 novel War […]
Singer-songwriter Janis Ian isn’t expected to pick up her guitar and sing at the Riviera Theatre on Sunday morning, April 6, but the audience will still get good glimpses in her life and songbook via a preview screening of the new documentary Janis Ian: Breaking Silence. The movie, written and directed by Varda Bar-Kar, makes […]
The pop chestnut “The Rose” sold a million copies for Bette Midler, who sang the ballad in the 1979 movie of the same name and took home a Grammy award to boot. But it was Amanda McBroom that wrote the song that has become a classic, one that Conway Twitty covered for a No. 1 […]
Now in its 78th season, the Music Academy of the West’s annual summer festival, which runs from June 15 to August 9, offers an unparalleled blend of world class performances and musical discovery. Themed “Soundtrack to Summer,” the mega event showcases international artists performing alongside 150 of the academy’s gifted young musicians and 60 esteemed […]
As anyone knows who’s seen Storm Large subbing in with Pink Martini in the Portland band’s frequent visits to Santa Barbara, there’s not a lot of guile when the slyly sultry and self-possessed singer takes the stage – or does interviews. That’s been true no matter who’s she talking to or whether she’s singing punk-flavored […]
