Santa Barbara’s premier — and only professional — dance company, the State Street Ballet will offer a prelude to its 30th season in the form of a celebratory Gala at 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28 on the grounds of the Music Academy of the West, 1070 Fairway Road, Montecito.
“Hosted on the beautiful grounds of the Music Academy of the West, this opulent evening will include a welcome cocktail hour, a curated ballet and opera performance in Hahn Hall, a paddle raise for pointe shoes, and a three-course dinner under the stars,” says the State Street Ballet.
Like most events identified as a gala, this is, in part, a fundraiser, but performing arts companies have a distinct advantage in their fundraising in that — unlike a political or institutional fundraiser, where the virtue of our contributions must be its own reward — we get an immediate return on our money in the form of a delightful performance.
“Themed around our season opener, a double-bill of ‘Scheherazade’ and ‘The Firebird,’ the Gala will be a multi-sensory occasion, an extraordinary feast for the eyes, ears, and taste buds,” the dance company says.
The pairing of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov‘s symphonic fantasy “Scheherazade, Opus 35” (1888), and Igor Stravinsky‘s first big ballet “L’oiseau de feu/The Firebird” (1910) is an especially happy one, and quite evocative.
Stravinsky studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov from 1902 until the older man’s death in 1908, and their relationship is a study in musical compatibility — Stravinsky was never reticent in praising Korsakov’s influence on his writing of music — and total psychological incompatibility.
Stravinsky was an ardent and intransigent Christian; Korsakov was an atheist (which prompted Stravinsky to tell an interviewer that his mentor’s atheism precluded any kind of profundity in his art. Korsakov, for his part, used to tease Stravinsky a lot about his beliefs — reminding this writer, at least, of how Virginia Woolf used to tease T.S. Eliot about his Christianity).
To be sure, Korsakov was rather an anomaly among composers where religion is concerned. In my research, I have found few composers willing to do without God altogether.
This is not just because the Church is always hiring, but also, I’m convinced, because they find their gifts so uncanny and powerful that they superstitiously attribute them to God rather than DNA. (This is also why, I think, most of the great musicians I have known have gone out of their way to seem like average, ordinary folks.)
Korsakov never wrote a ballet, so far as I can tell, and while Stravinsky wrote many great works in many genres, he is chiefly celebrated as a composer of the ballets “The Firebird,” “Petrushka,” and “The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps.”
“Sheherazade” was not adapted as a ballet until two years after the composer died (June 4, 1910), at the Opéra Garnier in Paris by the Ballets Russes, with choreography by Michel Fokine and the libretto by Fokine and Léon Bakst).
This production — exotic, sensual, dominated by the masculine power of Nijinsky, and overtly sexual in its references — changed the whole direction of ballet at the time, bringing the male dancers up equal to the females instead of just being there to lift up the females and catch them in their leaps.
Tickets to the gala start at $300, with virtually no upper limit, according to the would-be donor’s resources.
To make your reservation, or for more information, call 805-845-1432, or visit https://statestreetballet.com/gala-rsvp.