Celebrating its sixth season, Chamber-on-the-Mountain of Ojai will offer as its next concert performers the celebrated young cello virtuoso Zlatomir Fung, with pianist Janice Carissa, at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 3, in Logan House, adjacent to the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, 8585 Ojai-Santa Paula Road.
A Meet the Artists reception will be held immediately following the performance.
The program will include selections from Joseph Dall’Abaco‘s “11 Capricci for Solo Cello” (ca1759); Ernest Bloch‘s “Baal Shem, for Cello and Orchestra/Piano, B. 47” (1939); Luciano Berio‘s “Sequenza XIVa for Violoncello” (2002); the premiere of a new work by Katherine Balch; and Johannes Brahms‘ “Cello & Piano Sonata in e-minor, Opus 38” (1862–65).
Joseph Marie Clément Ferdinand dall’Abaco (1710-1805) was born at the height of the baroque and died in the year Beethoven wrote his Fifth Symphony.
Born and christened in Brussels, he was musically trained by his father, Evaristo Felice dall’Abaco, a famous cellist. He spent his entire career in the service of various aristocratic courts and was probably as oblivious to the political revolutions swirling around him as to the musical ones.
Most of his compositions, all featuring the cello, were in the fluid contrapuntal style of the Italian baroque. He made the most of his native gifts, prospered, was created a baron by Prince Maximilian of Bavaria, and died, aged 95, on his lovely estate, Arbizzano di Valpolicella, Napoleonic Italy, near Verona.
Ernest Bloch, the Swiss-American-Israeli composer, who was one of the first to take up “residence” at the Music Academy of the West, wrote “Baal Shem” in 1939, an assertion of his Jewish heritage in the face of the Nazi onslaught, and dedicated the work to his mother.
Katherine Balch is a fascinating composer, of the newer sort.
Like all music, hers is indescribable, although at some point, in each of the half-dozen or so works of hers that I have heard, I am fleetingly reminded of some other composer — Morton Feldman, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Steve Reich, Edgar Varese, and so on — but would not be prepared to say that Balch was under the influence of any of them.
There is an a-temporal lack of forward motion in much that I have heard, but I would not call it eternity, or even stillness. She often seems governed by the duration and cycle of inhale/exhale. As the Lovin’ Spoonful once sang, “I don’t know what it is, but it sure is soft and strong.”
Admission to this concert is $25. Advance reservations may be purchased online at www.ChamberOnTheMountain.com.
— 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.