CAMA’s Masterseries continues with a piano recital by the joyous virtuoso (and knight of the realm), Sir András Schiff, at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in the Lobero Theater.
Schiff, no stranger to Santa Barbara music lovers (this is his seventh Masterseries appearance), will play:
Felix Mendelssohn’s “Fantasy in f#-minor, Opus 28 (1833);” Ludwig Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No.24 in F#-Major, Opus 78 (1809);” Johannes Brahms’s “Eight Pieces for Solo Piano, Opus 76 (1878)” and “Seven Fantasias for Solo Piano, Opus 116 (1892);” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “English Keyboard Suite No.6 in d-minor, BWV 811.”
This is an absolutely dreamy lineup, mostly German rather than Austrian, lyrical rather than percussive, soulful rather than brash: Mendelssohn and the Three B’s.
I for one have not the slightest doubt that Mendelssohn is an equal partner here, fully qualified for all the benefits of Olympian membership.
He was the last in that uncanny sequence of great composers who started producing great music while they were still children and died when they were still young — Pergolesi, Mozart, Schubert, Arriaga, Mendelssohn.
It is also fitting that a program that starts with Mendelssohn should end with Bach, for Bach’s current supremacy in Western music began in 1829, when Mendelssohn, in partnership with the actor Eduard Devrient, produced and conducted the first performance of the “Saint Matthew Passion” since Bach’s death.
“It is,” observed Felix, “an actor and a young Jew who have restored to Christian Europe its greatest music.”
This season’s sponsor is the Esperia Foundation, with the principal sponsor of this event being the Stephen & Carla Hahn Foundation; co-sponsored by Stephen J.M. and Anne Morris, and Craig and Ellen Parton; and Virginia Castagnola-Hunter, Laurel Abbott, Berkshire Hathaway Luxury Properties, Bridget Colleary, and Raye Haskell Melville as concert partners. (Gratia tibi ago.)
Tickets to this concert are $64 (Section A) and $54 (Section B), and can be purchased by phone at 966-4324 or 963-0761, or on line at http://camasb.org/pricing-and-seating/.
— 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.