The Community Arts Music Association continues its Centennial Season with a concert — at 8 p.m. Wednesday in The Granada Theatre — by the Russian National Orchestra, conducted by Mikhail Pletnev and featuring pianist George Li as a soloist.
As last year also marked the 100th anniversary of the arrival in America of Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), who lived here for the rest of his life (becoming a U.S. citizen a month before his death) and who performed two CAMA-sponsored recitals at the Lobero Theatre (in 1929 and 1941), the orchestra’s program will consist of three works by Rachmaninov: the Vocalise, Opus 34, No. 14 (1915, orchestrated by composer), the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C-Minor, Opus 18 (1901) and the Symphonic Dances, Opus 45 (1940).
The Russians got a late start in classical music. Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-57) was the first composer to find a wide audience within his own country, let alone Europe.
Before Glinka, Russia lived on imported composers and their music. Then the dam broke, and a tidal wave of gorgeous Russian music — not to mention Russian musicians — engulfed concert halls for the next hundred years. To cite only the unique and irreplaceable, where would we be without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich?
Although Stravinsky proclaimed Tchaikovsky “the most Russian of us all,” most of us non-Russians tend to hear, in Rachmaninov’s greatest works, the purest expression of the tragic Russian soul (in Company Business, CIA veteran Gene Hackman looks over at a suddenly quiet and brooding KGB veteran, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and says, “Now, don’t go all Russian on me!”). It is more, way more, than what Robert Craft dubbed “that utopia of hopeless melancholy,” though it is that, too.
For many of us baby-boom music lovers, the music of Rachmaninov — especially the second and third concertos — was a main reason why we stuck with classical music, or returned to it after the first wave of the British invasion receded.
Shorter than any of the symphonies, the Symphonic Dances seem to be coming into their own, at last. Embedded with wonderful tunes, they also display a rhythmic vigor that belies the composer’s age and physical infirmity. He was certainly good to the last drop.
There will be a pre-concert lecture by Derek Katz, professor of music history at UC Santa Barbara. It will begin at 7 p.m. The Granada doors will open at 6:45 p.m. Lecture seating is limited to the first 100 patrons. First come, first served.
Single tickets to this concert are $39 to $119, and they can be purchased at the Granada box office, 1214 State St., by phone at 805.899.2222 or online by clicking here.
— 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.