It is not surprising that the Camerata Pacifica’s 2021-22 season will be somewhat truncated (pre-pandemic seasons regularly included a May program, and often one in early June). Indeed, it is spectacularly heroic of the Camerata — and our other performing arts organizations — to have any season at all.
It is worth remembering that when we finally achieve something like a fully-functioning performing arts scene, it will have been built upon the work of these 300 Spartans who went on playing their music in the face of daunting, even crippling challenges. We will remember.
The Camerata will conclude its 2021-22 concert season, anyway, with a program featuring the virtuosity and insight of pianist Gilles Vonsattel, violinist Kristin Lee, violist Melissa Reardon, and cellist Ani Aznavoorian, performing Johann Sebastian Bach‘s “Overture in b-minor, ‘in the French Style,’ BWV 831” (1735) (Vonsattel); Johann Halvorsen‘s “Passacaglia in g-minor” (1897, after the “Passacaglia” from G. F. Handel‘s “Keyboard Suite No. 7 in g-minor, HWV 432 [ca1720]’)” (Lee & Ani Aznavoorian); and Robert Schumann‘s “Piano Quartet in Eb-Major, Opus 47” (1842) (All).
Little needs to be said about this program, being well within even the most reactionary music lover’s comfort zone. Probably, the Schumann is the least performed of the three works, but it is remarkably sunny and tuneful, and deserves to be more widely appreciated.
Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935) was a Norwegian composer who wrote many lovely original works, few if any of which seem to have become permanently established on modern concert programs. His one claim to universal popularity is his arrangement of Handel’s “Passacaglia in g-minor” (when Heifetz and Piatigorsky recorded soomething with your name on it, you may be said to have earned a little slice of immortality).
In a similar fashion, the Australian composer Arthur Benjamin secured a toe-hold on our permanent appreciation when he arranged some melodies from Cimarosa operas into a very fine oboe concerto. Halvorsen’s arrangement is several degrees warmer and lusher than Handel might have preferred, but as long as he got the check I doubt he would have complained.
Halvorsen and Benjamin are examples of composers who have used other people’s tunes to raise themselves out of obscurity.
Stravinsky was already world famous when he began using other composer’s melodies to make what are mostly original works, but, as gorgeous as “Pulcinella” (after Pergolesi) or “The Fairy’s Kiss” (after Tchaikovsky) may be, they are not the only works by which he is known.
Schoenberg‘s stunningly beautiful orchestral arrangement of Brahms‘ “First Piano Quartet” is something else again, since he claimed he was simply restoring a great Brahms symphony, for which the quartet was a mere sketch. It is rarely performed.
More in the Halvorsen line, Schoenberg’s great champion, René Leibowitz, arranged Bach’s “Passacaglia and Fugue in c-minor BWV 582” for a huge orchestra, but keeping Bach’s structure and notes, and produced an astonishingly powerful piece: Bach according to Wagner.
But throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, virtuoso soloists would compose “variations” on popular tunes (usually opera arias), which they could play in concert to thunderous applause.
Camerata Pacifica performs this program in Santa Barbara at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 22, in Hahn Hall at the Music Academy of the West, 1070 Fairway Road. They will also perform it at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, in Rothenberg Hall of The Huntington Museum in San Marino, 1151 Oxford Road; 8 p.m. Thursday, April 21, in Zipper Hall of The Colburn School in Los Angeles, 200 S. Grand Ave.; and 3 p.m. Sunday, April 24, in the Museum of Ventura County in Ventura, 100 E. Main St.
Admission to all venues is $68. For tickets and other information, show up at the box office, call the Camerata Pacifica, 805-884-8410, email tickets@cameratapacifica.org, or go online to www.cameratapacifica.org.
Masks and proof of full vaccination and booster are required at all Camerata Pacifica concerts.
— 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.