The next free concert from the Santa Barbara Music Club takes place at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 26, in the First United Methodist Church, 305 E. Anapamu St.
The program will consist of classical music pieces that one perceives as, in one way or another breaking the mold — “Set against the backdrop of their socio-historical, biographical, and aesthetic contexts, each of these pieces showcases an element of progressiveness, something groundbreaking.”
You needn’t be alarmed, however. The concert begins with three pieces for solo piano:
Frédéric Chopin’s “Ballade No. 1 in g-minor, Opus 23 (1836);” Claude Debussy’s “Reflets dans l’eau (1905)” and “La Cathédrale engloutie (1910)” (Steve Hodson, piano); followed by Carl Vine’s “Sonata for Flute and Piano (1992)” (Adriane Hill, flute; Christopher Davis, piano); and Ludwig Beethoven’s “Sonata for Piano and Violin in c-minor, Opus 30, No. 2 (1803),” (Han Soo Kim, violin; Neil Di Maggio, piano).
Not being a musicologist, I can’t really comment on the thematic coherence of the program. It was insightful of Hodson to couple Chopin and Debussy as he has. Most interpreters of Debussy have emphasized the radical nature of his innovations in harmony and form.
Once you have heard — via the Welte piano rolls — Debussy’s own performance of his works, you grasp immediately his reverence for Chopin, the validity of his claims of inheritance. The tradition he is rejecting is not at all the romanticism of Chopin, but the strict classicism of his immediate predecessors.
The Australian Carl Vine is a true original. His delicate and shimmering “Sonata” effortlessly sustains the illusion of weightlessness throughout his intricate developments and changes of mood, as if he were gliding through the swirling layers of cloud around Jupiter.
The event, as noted above, is free. For information on this or other Santa Barbara Music Club programs and performing artists, visit www.SBMusicClub.org.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.