For those who have not yet made it to one of the Music Academy of the West’s Picnic Concerts, featuring the brilliant young musicians who are the Academy’s raison d’être, then you have a chance on Saturday to spend up to six hours catching up on what you have missed and getting the jump on the remainder of the festival’s Picnic Concerts.
The Academy Fellows (students) begin their annual Chamber Music Marathon at 10 a.m. in Hahn Hall with a performance of Wolfgang Mozart’s String Quartet in D Major, K. 575, known as the “Prussian,” and will conclude that afternoon at 5 p.m., after a performance of Antonin Dvorak’s gorgeous String Quartet in F Major, Opus 96, called, in honor of the country in which it was composed, the “American.”
In between, we will hear exquisitely performed compositions by Carl Nielsen, Franz Schubert, Erwin Schulhoff, Ludwig Beethoven, Franz Josef Haydn, Igor Stravinsky, John Cage, Benedetto Marcello, Bela Bartók and Johann Sebastian Bach.
There will be a break for lunch from noon to 1 p.m. Tickets to the morning concert (10 a.m. to noon) are $8; tickets to the afternoon session (1 p.m. to 5 p.m.) are $12.
Notable among the morning program is Erwin Schulhoff’s Concertino for Flute, Viola, and Double Bass, composed in 1925. Schulhoff (1894-1942), being Jewish and a communist, was bound to get into trouble if he stayed in Central Europe once the Nazis came to power. He stayed, was arrested and shipped to a concentration camp in Bavaria, where he died of tuberculosis.
Schulhoff studied composition and piano with, among others, Claude Debussy and Max Reger. Before he started trying to write communist music (circa 1932), he was a very interesting composer, with something of Kurt Weill in him, and something of Ernest Krenek. The Concertino was composed well before his “socialist realism” stage.
Of special interest in the afternoon session is a performance of the concert suite from Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat from 1918, played in the original scoring for a septet of virtuosos.
At 1 p.m. Monday in Hahn Hall and at 1 p.m. Thursday in Lehmann Hall, the remarkable pianist Joseph Kalichstein, a Music Academy visiting artist, will lead two masterclasses: Monday’s solo piano and Thursday’s piano chamber.
Kalichstein is, of course, the piano leg of that unshakable tripod, the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, but he is equally formidable as a soloist. Born in Tel Aviv, he has been in the United States since 1962. He has collaborated with such celebrated conductors as Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Christoph von Dohnanyi, James DePreist, Charles Dutoit, Lawrence Foster, Zubin Mehta, Andre Previn, Kurt Sanderling, Leonard Slatkin, Edo de Waart and many more.
Reserved seating for Monday’s class is $14 keyboard side or $12 for other; open seating for Thursday’s class is $12 regular or $11 students and seniors.
Tickets for the above events may be purchased at the door, one hour before the concert, or by calling 805.969.8787, or by faxing an order to 805.969.4037.
Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.