The Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra is bringing in the brilliant violinist Cho-Liang Lin as guest conductor, and the incomparable pianist Andre-Michel Schub as soloist in a Mozart concerto at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Lobero Theatre. Not bad for starters.
The program will consist of three works: the Serenade for Strings in e minor, Opus 20, by Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934); the Concerto No. 23 in A Major for Piano and Orchestra, K. 488, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791); and the Symphony No.6 in C Major, D.589, by Franz Schubert (1797-1828). (If you have any romantic doubts that the general conditions of civilized life improved exponentially between the 18th century and the 20th, compare the dates of Mozart and Schubert to those of Elgar.)
If you only know his large-scale works like his two majestic symphonies, his gorgeously expansive concertos for cello and for violin, his Enigma Variations, his Falstaff Suite, and his sublime oratorios like The Dream of Gerontius or The Music Makers, you are bound to be somewhat surprised by Elgar’s exquisite Serenade. The delicate filaments of melody, the translucent orchestration, seem to come from another composer entirely than the one who wrote the “Pomp and Circumstance” marches. During his lifetime, he found himself linked with Richard Strauss and Anton Bruckner. Since his death, he is most usually yoked with Ralph Vaughan Williams as a “British Symphonist.” Yet in his heart of hearts, as the Serenade shows, he identified most closely with the musical world of the other two composers on this program — and even more closely with the one whose bicentennial we are celebrating this year: Felix Mendelssohn. Only a hopeless Mendelssohnian could have written The Starlight Express. To the end of his life, Elgar maintained that the Serenade for Strings was his favorite work.
“The concertos are,” wrote Mozart to his father, in December 1782, “agreeable to the ears(!) Here and there are things which only connoisseurs can appreciate, but I have seen to it that those less knowledgeable must also be pleased without knowing why.” There is nothing much anybody can add to this. If it is not presumptuous, I might add that this A Major piano concerto is, except for two operas, my favorite Mozart composition. You have only to hear it to know what I mean.
Schubert’s Sixth Symphony is sometimes called “the Little C” to distinguish it from the ponderous and over-rated “Great C” written some eight years later. Schubert completed seven symphonies in all, but his reputation as a symphonist rests mainly on one of the four or five works he left incomplete, the No. 8 in b minor, D. 759, known, appropriately enough, as “The Unfinished.” Like the later work in the same key, the No. 6 is in thrall to Ludwig van Beethoven — as was all Europe, at the time — but, unlike the “Great C,” the “Little C” is much more than imitation Beethoven. It is a rather splendid thing, well-made, tuneful, and lively. It deserves to be played much more often than it is.
Click here to order tickets or call the Lobero Theatre Box Office at 805.963.0761. Single tickets for this concert are $46 (Section A) and $42 (Section B); both prices include a $3 facility fee.
Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.