The performers at the next free concert by the Santa Barbara Music Club will be violist Rodney Wirtz and composer-pianist Paolo Tatafiore offering a program of Retro Works.
The concert, co-sponsored by the Santa Barbara Public Library, bears the motto Retro Works, and takes place at 3 p.m. Saturday, March 9, in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Central Library, 40 E. Anapamu St.
The program contains “works that rely heavily on historical models for inspiration, structure, and even genre but with a bold, modernized style and sound:” Tatafiore’s “Variations for Viola and Piano,” and Frédéric Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No. 2 in b-flat-minor, Opus 35” (1839-1840).
For elucidation of the Paolo Tatafiore work (the Chopin, of course, requires none), I pass on this annotation from the Music Club’s publicist:
“Tatafiore dedicated the work to his daughter and also attributed it to J.S. Bach, a wellspring of inspiration for countless composers. According to Tatafiore, the structure of his piece emulates that of Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations in the vein of canonic writing.
“Throughout the Bach’s work, he cast every third variation as a canon at successive intervals. In other words, Variation 3 is a canon at the unison; Variation 6 is a canon at the interval of a second; Variation 9 at the third, and so on.
“Tatafiore follows suit with 7 perfect canons at different intervals. Also as in the Goldberg Variations, Tatafiore begins and ends the piece with a statement of the main melody.
“In preparing to write a work that would allow for such contrapuntal flexibility, he followed the principles of his Italian mentor Giancarlo Bizzi. Bizzi studied the ‘Tabula mirifica omnia contrapuntisticae artis arcana revelans’ (‘The amazing board that reveals all the secrets of contrapuntal art’) published by A. Kircher in Rome (1650).
“According to Tatafiore, Bizzi deciphered the techniques that many Renaissance and Baroque composers, including Bach, used to master the art of counterpoint. Tatafiore’s ‘Variations’ betrays a deep, structural awareness of the past, and he models it after one of the most well-known sets of theme and variations in Western keyboard literature.
“Tatafiore departs from the historical model and retrofits it by casting it in modern harmony and melody, which includes intervals Bach typically did not employ: ninths, elevenths and sometimes thirteenths.
“The melody, according to Tatafiore, ‘is very passionate and could very well have been composed by a songwriter in the ’60s or ’70s of the last century.’
“Finally, he scored the piece for the viola because he believes ‘the solo possibilities of this incredible and underestimated instrument haven’t been thoroughly explored yet.’”
As note above, admission to this concert is free and the public is invited. For more information, visit https://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.