The Santa Barbara Music Club’s next free concert will begin at 3 p.m. Saturday in the Faulkner Gallery of the main branch of the Santa Barbara Central Library, 40 E. Anapamu St. As is usually the way with these splendid events, the concert will last about an hour.
The first four works on the program — the only ones not written by French speakers — will be performed by an all-star quartet of cellists (Carole Roe, David Roe, Kathryn Mendenhall and Sally Greenebaum), who will play the Humoresque from Julius Klengel’s Opus 5, Two Chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach and Ja-da: Barbershop Harmony Piece from 1918 by Robert Louis “Bob” Carleton.
Next, pianist Donna Massello-Chiacos will perform the “Prélude” from Claude Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, “La valée de cloches” from Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs and Françis Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels. The afternoon’s entertainment will conclude with the viola-piano arrangement of César Franck’s Sonata in A-Major for Violin and Piano.
Klengel (1859-1933) was a German cellist and composer. He joined the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra at age 15 and played in that celebrated band for the next 50 years, rising to principal cellist. He also toured Europe as a cellist and soloist of the Gewandhaus Quartet. His name may not be familiar to most music lovers today, but anyone who taught both Emanuel Feuermann and Gregor Piatigorsky the cello cannot be said to have had no impact on European music.
Pianist and composer Carleton (1894-1956) was born in Missouri and died in Burbank. He wrote more than 500 songs. Ja-Da was a huge hit during World War I.
If you want to get a look at him, he has a brief cameo as a pianist in the 1946 movie Bringing Up Father.
Franck’s Violin Sonata in A, one of the undisputed pinnacles of the repertory, was written in 1886 as a wedding present for 31-year-old violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who played it at his wedding reception. It was first played in public on Dec. 16 of that year, in the Museum of Modern Painting in Brussels, whose bylaws forbade the use of artificial light.
Ysaÿe and pianist Léontine Bordes-Pène were the performers. The work was last on a very long program, and the players wound up having to play the work in the dark, from memory. Vincent d’Indy was in the audience and wrote a witty account of the incident.
The Sonata in A-Major has been transcribed for cello, viola, flute, alto saxophone, tuba, organ with choir, violin and strings, and violin and orchestra, although the setting for cello and piano was the only alternative version sanctioned by Franck. Some have speculated that Franck originally planned it as a sonata for cello and piano and switched to violin and piano when Ysaÿe’s commission came in over the transom.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews.
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