The Santa Barbara Music Club’s first free concert of the New Year — its fourth in the 2023-24 season — takes place at 3 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 13, at Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, 4575 Auhay Drive.
The performers will be pianist and composer Eric Valinsky; violinist Sofia Malvinni; and pianist Betty Oberacker.
Valinsky will perform Claude Debussy’s “Suite bergamasque for solo piano” (1890, 1905) — “including, of course, the beloved “Clair de lune”—and the concert premiere of the “Summer” and “Spring” movements from his own work, “Wisperfal” (2010), based on Antonio Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” (1725).
Any music that starts from Vivaldi is odds-on to please a lot of people, I’d say.
Maestro Valinsky told me, however, that “although the piece is based on Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ we had a dispute with Vivaldi on how we thought about summer, at least in the United States. Having been in Venice during the summer, we know about the miserable weather, the biting insects, and violent thunderstorms, but that’s not how we think of Summer here. So I used parts of the last movement of Vivaldi’s Opus 3, No. 3.”
Sofia Malvinni and Betty Oberacker will play Reinhold Glière’s luscious “Romance in D-Major for Violin and Piano, Opus 3” (1902), and Serge Prokofiev’s fascinating “Violin & Piano Sonata No. 2 in D-Major, Opus 94a” (1944).
Reinhold Glière (1875-1956) is sometimes identified as a “Russian” composer, although he was born in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, to a German father and Polish mother.
He is also called a “Soviet” composer, and this is more or less indisputable. Between the Bolshevik takeover, in 1917, and his own death, in 1956, he remained in the Soviet Union and never traveled — as did so many of his Soviet contemporaries — to Western Europe or America.
At the Moscow Conservatory (1894-1900), Glière studied with Sergei Taneyev, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, and Anton Arensky, among others. Ippolitov-Ivanov (“Caucasian Sketches”), a disciple of Rimsky-Korsakov, was probably the decisive influence on his style.
Unlike Shostakovich or Prokofiev, Glière never fell afoul of Stalin, never got into that kind of trouble, so the West was never moved to champion him during the Cold War, which means that most of his truly beautiful music remains under-performed in Western Europe and America.
Some, hearing the lovely “Romance,” might be moved to seek out more of his compositions. I recommend his “Harp Concerto in Eb-Major, Opus 74” (1938); his ballet “The Red Poppy, Opus 70” (1928); and his “Symphony No. 3 in b-minor, Opus 42, ‘Ilya Murometz’ ” (1911).
What sets Glière apart from most Soviet composers is the absence of irony in his music. There is melancholy, there is martial grandeur, there is tragedy, there is humor and romance, but they are all delivered straight and unsmiling.
No, “nudge-nudge-wink-wink,” which sometimes tips into vulgar burlesque with Shostakovich, but with Prokofiev, in this sonata, the irony is delivered with gleaming, stainless steel precision
Soviet irony is a distinct subspecies of the discursive style. Consider this Soviet joke: “Capitalism is the exploitation of one man by another, while socialism is just the opposite,” or Shostakovich’s remark when he was asked if Stalin liked his opera, “Lady Macbeth of the Mitsenk District”: “A criminal ruler? Why should that interest Stalin?”
Prokofiev left the Soviet Union in 1917, and from then until 1936, he lived in the United States, then Germany, then Paris. The first movement of the sonata is a charming souvenir of his Paris days.
The main theme might be from Poulenc, or Satie (he knew them both). The movement itself is a roller-coaster ride, a tunnel of love, a holiday fireworks show. And that’s just the first movement.
As noted above, admission to this concert is free, but if you insist on giving them money, I’m sure you be afforded an opportunity to do so when you get there.