The next concert offering of the Santa Barbara Music Club — free and open to anyone who shows up — will take place at 3 p.m. Saturday in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 E. Anapamu St.
The afternoon’s entertainment is a music lover’s delight — nothing so vulgar as “easy listening” but certainly very easy to listen to.
Pianist Donna Massello-Chiacos will play three pieces by Frederic Chopin — the Mazurka in C-Major, Opus 24 No. 2, the Nocturne in f-minor, Opus 55, No. 1 and the Polonaise in c#-minor, Opus 26, No. 1.
Then the inestimable pianist Betty Oberacker will accompany soprano Carolyn Kimball Holmquist as she sings Gioacchino Rossini’s “La regata veneziana,” and three art songs by Peter Tchaikovsky (“Was I Not a Blade of Grass?” “At the Ball” “The Cuckoo”).
Finally, flautist Adrian Spence and pianist Christopher Davis will perform Franz Schubert’s Variations on “Trockne Blumen” D802.
Could one have wandered into a bourgeois salon in Europe or America any time between 1850 and 1914 (even later in certain parts of Paris), this is exactly the sort of of program one would have heard. The seating arrangements would no doubt have been considerably less utilitarian than those of the Faulkner Gallery, the attire would have been more formal and there would have been at least the possibility of liquid refreshment, but the music — the main thing, after all, unless one were a social climber — would have been just the same, if not so reliably well-played.
God bless the Music Club.
— 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.