The Camerata Pacifica chamber music society will play its November program twice in Santa Barbara, at 1 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Friday in Hahn Hall at the Music Academy of the West.
The full program consists of Gioachino Rossini’s String Sonata No. 3 in C Major for two Violins, Cello and Double Bass (1804), Elisabeth Lutyens’ “Driving Out the Death” for Oboe Quartet, Opus 81, Peter Wiegold’s “Earth, Receive an Honoured Guest for English Horn and String Trio (1998) and Franz Schubert’s Quintet in A Major for Piano and Strings, D. 667, “Trout”.
They will be performed, in various combinations, by Nicholas Daniel on oboe/English horn, Catherine Leonard on violin, Richard Yongjae O’Neill on viola, Andrew Janss on cello, Tim Eckert on double bass and Adam Neiman on piano.
Only the Lutyens and Schubert pieces will be performed at the 1 p.m. “lunchtime” concert.
Trust a Camerata program to send me plunging into reference works and surfing YouTube.
Lutyens (1906-13) is a particularly interesting case. Most English music historians credit her with introducing Austrian serialism to England, and her highly idiosyncratic application of Arnold Schoenberg’s rules produced works of great proficiency and austere beauty. Though she remains an obscure figure in classical music, she made a very handsome living with her (non-serial) film and television scores, particularly for a series of Hammer horror films. She was a no-nonsense person, in all that she did, and she seems to have felt herself bound by no social conventions whatever.
The daughter of the famous architect and theosophist Sir Edwin Lutyens, she spent years of her childhood with J. Krishnamurti, who was her parents’ houseguest at the time. She decided to become a composer when she was 9.
In the British film industry, she gave herself legendary status when she replied to an impatient producer: “Do you want it good, or do you want it Wednesday?”
For tickets and other concert information, click here or call Camerata Pacifica at 805.884.8410.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer.