The UCSB Department of Music offers a fall concert aptly called “Cornucopia” by the University Wind Ensemble, directed by Paul Bambach, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4 in Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall (Music Building).
The program consists of Jack Stamp’s Antithigram, Samuel Barber’s First Essay for Orchestra, William Schuman’s George Washington Bridge, Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, the Overture to Leonard Bernstein’s Candide; Derek Bourgeois’ Perchance to Dream, Norman Dello Joio’s Scenes from “The Louvre” (1965) and Samuel Hazo’s Sevens.
One of the most admirable things about Bambach is his devotion to living, especially American, composers. Of the seven composers on the above program, all but Bourgeois were born and raised in the USA (Bourgeois is English).
Either Professor Bambach has extremely good taste or he has been extremely and consistently lucky in his choices for the past couple decades, but either way, I have heard a lot of very good music at Wind Ensemble concerts that I had never heard before — and would probably never have heard otherwise.
Dello Joio (1913-2008) was a terrific composer, a pioneer in writing for television. He grasped immediately that the best way to get your music on television was not as a film of a concert hall performance, but as incidental music.
Richard Rodgers’ Victory at Sea was the pathfinder, but Dello Joio’s music for the CBS program Air Power was not far behind. It is entirely fitting that he be represented on this program by his score for another television program, the five-movement suite for winds extracted from his score for the NBC special The Louvre — for which he won an Emmy in 1965.
Sympathetic to most of the great movements in modern music, he nevertheless wrote his own with unimprovable art. He is unique, without flamboyance.
Tickets to this concert are $10 for general admission, $5 for students and free for UCSB students. They will be available at the door.
— 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.