The Community Arts-Music Association (CAMA) continues its 2022 Masterseries with a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 23, in the Lobero Theater. The featured artist will be the internationally acclaimed soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, in collaboration with violinist Mark Fewer and pianist Jamie Parker.
The program, called Glorious and Free, is devoted to “Romani-inspired Songs and Operetta Arias,” and includes the vocal works of Johannes Brahms (1833-97), Antonín Dvořák (1844-1904), Sebastián Iradier (1809-65), Joaquín Valverde Durán (1846-1910), Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908), Maurice Yvain (1891-1965), Franz Lehár/Lehár Ferenc (1870-1948), and Emmerich Kálmán/Kálmán Imre (1882-1953).
The people who call themselves “Romani” began their journey into European history somewhere in the mountainous northern regions of India. They reached Europe sometime toward the end of the fourteenth century. They are notable in that they have no attachment to real estate, no sacred national ground.
Although they have learned to speak fluently all the languages in the countries where they live, they have never become fully assimilated into any of them, remaining more or less a self-conscious minority.
They universally reject the term “gypsies,” by which most of the rest of the world knows them, because of its implications of criminality, shiftlessness, and racial inferiority. (From 1933-45, they were the targets of an attempted genocide by the Nazis, who murdered between 220,000 and 1.5 million of them).
Although they never became fully European, the Romani nevertheless had a tremendous impact on European music. They excelled in music, particularly stringed instruments — especially the fiddle — and there are few European composers who did not, at one time or another, take a hand at composing “gypsy” music.
Notwithstanding the close association, in the public mind, between the Hungarians and the “gypsies,” there are only two Hungarian composers on the program, and they are not of the first rank.
Indeed, Lehár was mainly Hungarian by accident, having been born in Hungary where his Austrian bandmaster father stationed where his mother, of German descent, had been living. Kálmán, a native and patriotic Hungarian, was nevertheless born to a Jewish family in a geographical vortex of anti-Semitism. Ultimately, it kept him on the move.
As Wikipedia notes: “Despite his Jewish origins, he was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite composers. After the Anschluss, he rejected Hitler’s offer to become an ‘honorary Aryan’ and was forced to move first to Paris, then to the United States, settling in California in 1940.”
There are three Spaniards on the program, although one of them, Sebastián Iradier, was actually a Basque (another fascinating and mysterious minority), and would probably have self-identified as one, given his druthers, rather than as Spanish.
Tickets to Isabel Bayrakdarian are $38 and $48, and can be purchased in person at the Lobero box office, 33 E. Canon Perdido St., by calling 805-963-0761, or by going online to https://checkout.lobero.com/15885?z=0.
— 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.