The Westmont College music faculty will open the fall season with a concert at 7 p.m. Friday in Deane Chapel on the Westmont campus.
Admission is free, and the public is invited.
Bass-baritone Dr. Emil Dorian Cristescu, with pianist Dr. Steve Hodson, will open with two arias by Giuseppe Verdi: “Come dal ciel Precipita” from the opera Macbeth and “Il lacerato spirito” from Simone Boccanegra.
Then, violinist Dr. Han Soo Kim and pianist Neil Di Maggio will play the first movement “Presto” from Ludwig Beethoven’s Sonata No. 4 in A-Minor, Opus 23 (1801), followed by soprano Celeste Tavera and pianist John Douglas, performing “Summertime” from George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess (1935); pianist Douglas playing his own composition, “Svetlana”; flautist Andrea Eden Di Maggio and pianist Neil Di Maggio playing Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante defunte (1899); Tavera returns to sing, with the collaboration of pianist Aaron Wilk, “Nobles Seigneurs,” by Giacomo Meyerbeer; organist Dr. Hodson plays two of his Hymn-tune Preludes: “New Britain” and “Eventide” (Monk); and the concert ends with clarinetist Joanne Kim, violist Dr. Han Soo Kim, and pianist Seungah Seo playing the third movement “Rondeau-Allegretto” from Mozart’s Trio in Eb-Major for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, K. 498, “Kegelstatt” (1786).
Now, this is quite a delectable sampler, you must admit. I only know the Ravel as an orchestral piece, but the flute-piano arrangement — especially as played by the De Maggios — will probably conjure up the misty moonlight mysteries of the “Sicilienne” from Faure’s incidental music for Pelleas et Melisande, and is very much the sort of ravishing ambiguity the French — and the Belgians — were into at the birth of the 20th century.
When we listen to “Summertime” as an aria, instead of a number in a Broadway review, it seems some unique form of masterpiece, achieving the maximum emotional effects with the simplest of means, as close as we have come yet to a perfect fusion of jazz and classical.
“Today, I think that melody is out of favor,” wrote my favorite French crackpot, Jean Dutourd, in 1958. “Only technique is admired … Johann Sebastian Bach, whom people are so mad about just now, is fine only when his work has melody; after all, it is in melody that genius lies. The rest of the time, in his icily arithmetical compositions, he is mortally dull. Bacchic frenzy is one of the characteristics of our contemporary pedants. Everyone lays claim to knowing music, but almost no one yields to its sweetness, its joys, its raptures. People go to concerts the way they go to stare at electronic machines. Alain [Emile Chartier] has said, ‘I am close to regarding as a monster the man who would read a novel to find out how that novel was put together.’ When one isn’t a performer or composer oneself, and one listens to music to find out how it is put together, one is a monster.”
This concert, including the Mozart and Beethoven, is all about yielding to music’s “sweetness, its joys, its raptures.”
Admission, once again, is free. For more information about Westmont musical events, call 805.565.6040.
— 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.