Gerald Carpenter: Music Club Offers 2 Concerts for the Price of None

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By Gerald Carpenter, Noozhawk Contributor

The first of the free performances will be Wednesday morning in the Faulkner Gallery

Those able to steal an hour away from their busy mornings to attend the Santa Barbara Music Club’s free Morning Concert at 11 a.m. Wednesday in the library’s Faulkner Gallery will earn an unusually rich assortment of treats.

An ensemble known as the Delightful Divas (soprano Donna Gibbs, mezzo-soprano Susan Kuehn and John Sonquist on piano) will start things off with a set of five songs written by Welsh composer-actor-playwright Ivor Novello: “Love is My Reason,” “I Can Give You the Starlight,” “And Her Mother Came Too,” “Glamorous Night” and “My Life Belongs To You.”

Then, we’ll hear the Andante in C Major, K. 315 and the Rondo in D Major, K. 184 by Mozart, played by Mary Jo Hartle on flute and Allen Bishop on piano.

Next, soprano Nicole Dechaine and the incomparable pianist Egle Januleviciute will perform Three Sapphic Songs by writer and composer (and active Santa Barbara music lover) William Ramsay.

The concert will conclude with a performance of the Sonata in G-Minor for Cello and Piano, Opus 19 of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff by Santa Barbara’s indispensable Geoffrey Rutkowski on cello and UCSB’s collaborative genius Natasha Kislenko on piano.

Santa Barbarans kept Gosford Park at the Plaza de Oro week after week, so it’s likely that some in the audience of this concert will recall the handsome piano player who kept being asked to perform, and who always obliged. That was the only historical character in the film, Novello (Jeremy Northam).

While he played, the servants gathered in the shadows and listened, rapt, while the gentry played bridge and intrigued and mostly found his music tiresome. It wasn’t because the gentry had better taste in music, or anything else. As Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) said in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons: “The nobility of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount.”

The Music Club’s free Matinée Concert this month will be at 3 p.m. March 20 in the usual venue of the Faulkner Gallery. Though it costs only the effort it takes to get there, this concert, too, is exceptionally rich in talented musicians.

The concert begins with soprano Carol Ann Manzi and pianist Betty Oberacker performing Robert Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und-Leben (“A Woman’s Love and Life”), Opus 42, a setting of eight poems by Adelbert von Chamisso. (The cycle was written in 1840, a year of song and happiness for Schumann; he finally overcame all obstacles, especially her father’s objections, and married Clara Josephine Wieck, not minding at all that she was a better pianist than him).

In conclusion, we’ll hear the extraordinarily gifted pianist Zeynep Ucbasaran playing the Etudes I-V of Ahmet Adnan Saygun (1907-91), and the Polonaise-Fantasie of Frédéric François Chopin. Saygun was arguably Turkey’s most important composer of the 20th century.

Ucbasaran, of Turkish descent, is a very persuasive advocate of Saygun’s works, and has released at least two CDs containing his works, one — Naxos 8.570746 — being exclusively devoted to the piano music of her compatriot.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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