The Music Academy’s stellar chamber music series, Festival Artists, plunges into this last week of the 2019 Festival with a concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 6, in the Lobero Theater. A complimentary, festive reception with the artists follows the performance, outdoors in the Lobero Theatre Courtyard.
The program for this concert includes performances of Charles Koechlin‘s “Four Little Pieces for Clarinet and French Horn, Opus 173” (1938), by Richie Hawley, clarinet, and Julie Landsman, horn; composer-in-residence Jennifer Higdon‘s “Darkwood” for Violin, Cello, Bassoon, and Piano, with Jorja Fleezanis, violin, David Geber, cello, Benjamin Kamins, bassoon, and Natasha Kislenko, piano; Antonin Dvořák‘s “Terzetto for Two Violins & Viola, Opus 74” (1887), by Kathleen Winkler and Marin Osawa,* violins, Cynthia Phelps, viola; and Robert Schumann‘s “Quintet in Eb-Major for Piano and Strings, Opus 44” (1842), by Robert McDonald piano, Glenn Dicterow and Kathleen Winkler, violins; Karen Dreyfus, viola, and David Geber, cello. (*Academy fellow)
A rank outsider while he lived (the more unpopular a cause, the more likely he was to embrace it), the music of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) has been steadily gaining ground with the music-loving public in recent decades — thanks, in large part, to the championing of modernist ensembles like UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and their recently retired director Jeremy Haladyna, who is a tremendous fan of Koechlin.
It is mainly the chamber music that benefits from this awakening; he wrote a wealth of orchestral music, but “Koechlin” stopping several light years short of being a household word, symphony orchestras have learned, to their cost, that curiosity seldom fills a house.
Koechlin’s music is an ever-evolving blend of styles and influences, and would have sounded a good deal more “modern” to an audience in 1910 than it does today. Much of it is lovely, and all of it is worth a listen.
I have heard a fair amount of Jennifer Higdon’s music now, and have enjoyed all that I heard, even the weird stuff. Indeed, the only bone I have to pick with her concerns her penchant for withholding the date of composition of all the works in her considerable and varied oeuvre.
Indeed, except for her birth in 1962, and her reception of the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, dates are mighty hard to come by on her website, or with anything connected to her on the web. Call it an historian’s prejudice, but I like to know if two works were composed at the same time or 10 years apart — and, if the latter, which was first.
It’s fun to trace the development of an artist over time, with one work leading to another, but without any dates, one is likely to make a terrible ass of oneself.
The Dvořák “Terzetto” is yet another under-appreciated gem in the composer’s astonishingly rich catalogue of chamber works.
Tickets to this Festival Artists Concert are $46 (Community Access $10, if available; 7-17s free), and they may be obtained by calling 805-969-8787, or by going online to www.musicacademy.org/whats-on/mafas-vii/book/24607/.
— 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.