The ever-creative Santa Barbara Symphony, under the baton of Maestro Nir Kabaretti, continues its 2019-20 season with a pair of concerts at 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 16. and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17, in the Granada Theater. This program was to have marked the local debut of world-renowned Croatian soprano Lana Kos, but Kos has taken ill and will be unable to perform.
Joining the symphony to solo in the Mozart and Mahler — with “thrilling vocal color” and “sweetly winning” presence ˆ will be the rising American soprano, Anya Matanovič.
The program will consist of Wolfgang Mozart‘s “Exsultate, Jubilate for Soprano in F-Major, K. 165/158a” (1773); Julia Wolfe’s “Fuel for Strings” (2007); along with the related film by Bill Morrison; and Gustav Mahler‘s “Symphony No. 4 in G-Major” (1901).
This program is made possible through the generosity of artist sponsor Christine A. Green, along with selection sponsors Sam and Alene Hedgpeth, and Dr. Robert W. Weinman.
Little need be said about the Mozart, except that it ecstatically fulfills the promise of its title to “shout with joy.”
Wolfe converts her “Fuel” into pure energy with Einsteinian intensity. She wrote it in 2007 as a collaboration with the film-maker Bill Morrison, who has done similar joint projects with the Kronos Quartet and composers John Adams, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Morrison’s film will be shown during the performance of Wolfe’s work.
As for Wolfe’s music overall, I bow to the felicity of the Wall Street Journal scribe who wrote that her music has “long inhabited a terrain of its own, a place where classical forms are recharged by the repetitive patterns of minimalism and the driving energy of rock.” Be prepared.
Mahler used to say, “My time will come,” and indeed it did, with the help of Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Jascha Horenstein, Erich Leinsdorf and, above all, Leonard Bernstein. Mahler’s music was the great discovery of the fanatical music lovers — such as yours truly — of the post-World War II baby boom.
The fact that our elders generally pooh-poohed Mahler’s music as vulgar, bombastic and derivative only intensified our desire to hear him. Nobody the snobs hated that much could be all bad.
The phenomenal rise in Mahler’s popularity after 1960 — his centennial, in observance of which Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the entire cycle of nine symphonies — was made possible by the decision by Columbia Records (with all the other companies soon following suit) to put all its money into 12-inch plastic discs revolving at 33 and a third times per minute, rather than into 7-inch 45s; not a single Mahler movement would fit onto one of the latter disks.
(Not just Mahler benefitted from the Lp, of course; I still have a Beethoven’s “Ninth,” conducted by Stokowski, on 12-inch 78s: it is 10 disks and weighs more than 20 pounds.)
I couldn’t afford to attend live symphony concerts, and if I could, Mahler was even scarcer in the concert halls than he was on records. With the Bernstein recordings, and those by Leinsdorf when he was head of the Boston, the Mahler boom was on. It is, I think, dying down now.
“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
— (Eliot/Prufrock)
Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony” is traditionally the favorite of those who don’t care for his music. It’s first movement was, in fact, the first Mahler I ever heard. I was terribly disappointed. I expected and longed for extravagant emotionalism, violent sarcasm, hyper-romanticism. Instead, there were sleigh bells, nimble delicacy, exquisite melodies …
“It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: 105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
— (Prufrock, Ibid.)
I lifted the stylus, replaced the record in the sleeve, and returned it to the front desk. In the following weeks, I listened to the “First,” and then the “Third.” That was more like it. That was the Mahler my teen-aged self had been hoping to find. Over the top, heart on sleeve, raging nd loving …
“He’s too like you, Kafka — even more like you, perhaps, than you are yourself.”
— Lem Dobbs, “Kafka”
Years later, I made my way back to the “Fourth” and fell completely under its spell. The slow movement is one of Mahler’s greatest, and he was a composer largely defined for us by his adagios. What I had first taken for cheerfulness in the first movement was reveal to me, at last, as a kind of whistling past the graveyard.
I understood what the late Lawrence Leighton Smith meant when he assured me this was Mahler at his most pessimistic: “I mean,” he said, “grim.”
Yet, it is not necessary, or even advisable, to hear it this way. As always, Oscar Wilde‘s warning is sound: “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.” And on the surface, Mahler’s “Fourth Symphony” is a sweet dream of a better world. Believe it.
Single tickets to these concerts are $31-$135; they can be purchased from the Granada box office, 1214 State St., by phone at 805-899-2222, or online at www.granadasb.org.
To get the symphony’s entire 66th season, visit www.thesymphony.org/performances.
— 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.