At 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 17, in the First United Methodist Church, 305 E. Anapamu St., the Santa Barbara Music Club will offer the next installment in its glorious series of free concerts.
Featured performers will be violinist Chavdar Parashkevov and pianist Natasha Kislenko. This is, of course, not a randomly assembled combination from the Music Club membership roster.
The Parashkevov – Kislenko Duo was established in 2009, and is now an esteemed member of the international music community, having concertized — to great acclaim — in Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Turkey and the USA, as well as playing live radio broadcasts in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Houston, Texas, plus a televised recital in Sofia.
They released their first CD, Russian Sonatas, in 2011, and just recently put out a new CD, Beethoven. Brahms. Mahler.
On Saturday, the Duo will play Leonid Nikolayev’s “Sonata in g-minor for Violin and Piano, Opus 11” (1908); selections from George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” (1935) and his “Three Preludes” (1926), all arranged by Jascha Heifetz; the “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s “Symphony No. 5 in c#-minor,” arranged for violin and piano by Otto Wittenbecher; and Pancho Vladigerov’s “Rachenitza, Opus 18.”
Leonid Nikolayev (1878-1942) — not to be confused with the Leonid Nikolayev who murdered the high Soviet official, Sergei Kirov, in 1934 (with, it is assumed, Stalin’s connivance) — was a noted Russian/Soviet pianist and composer.
Though he wrote a good deal of excellent music, it was as a professor of piano at Lenningrad Conservatory that Nikolayev made his mark and had the most influence.
Among his star pupils was Dmitri Shostakovich, who admired his teacher “as a first-class musician and a man of great wisdom and learning,” adding that:
“He trained not simply pianists, but in the first place thinking musicians. He didn’t create a school in the specific sense of some single narrow professional direction. He shaped and nurtured a broad aesthetic trend in the sphere of pianistic art.”
Both the Gershwin selections, though neither was written for the violin-piano combo, translate perfectly in the Heifetz arrangements, taking on a totally different ethnic character in the process, becoming the sort of tunes Stravinsky might have written if he had grown up in Budapest.
Vladigerov (1899-1978) was a Bulgarian composer, pedagogue, and pianist, the first — and arguably the greatest — Bulgarian classical musician to achieve a reputation outside his own country. His mother’s name was Pasternak, and the composer was a first cousin to the author of Dr. Zhivago.
He drew heavily on Bulgarian folk tunes in his compositions, though he was completely the master of classical forms. A passage in Antarctica bears his name — an honor few, if any, musicians could claim.
The concert, as noted above, is free. For additional information about this or other Santa Barbara Music Club programs and performing artists, visit www.sbmusicclub.org.
— 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.