The Santa Barbara Music Club will open its 2024-25 season of fabulous free concerts at 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19 in St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, 4575 Auhay Drive, with a recital featuring the dazzling pianists Myroslava Kisilevitch and Natasha Kislenko, performing a variety of European compositions of the nineteenth century, including:
Franz Schubert’s “Fantasia in f-minor, D. 940, Opus Posthumous” (1828); Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s “October” from “The Seasons, Opus 37a, No. 10” (1876); Cecile Chaminade’s “Thème Varié in A Major, Opus 89” (1898); Maurice Ravel’s “Ma Mère l’Oye/Mother Goose, M. 60” (1908-10); and the “Overture” from Mykola Lysenko’s epic opera “Taras Bulba” (1924) (arranged by Levko Revutsky).
Schubert and Tchaikovsky are composers known and loved everywhere, and by all. They need nothing in the way of introduction.
Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was the first woman composer to be awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. Her music is gorgeous — romantic, with a few impressionistic brush strokes.
Chaminade toured the USA as a pianist several times, and her playing, along with her compositions, were great favorites with the American public.
If she is not particularly well-known nowadays, it is simply due to the fact that, after she ceased to be a living presence in concert halls, the most eloquent champion of her music, the overwhelming male bias of the music world took over.
Mykola Vitaliiovych Lysenko (1842-1912) was a Ukrainian composer, pianist, conductor and ethnomusicologist.
He was a prolific composer, writing many piano pieces, more than 100 art songs, operas, as well as orchestral, chamber and choral music, although his magnum opus was his unfinished opera, “Taras Bulba,” based on the short novel by Nikolai Gogol, a fairly straightforward epic and, thus, somewhat apart from the bulk of that most eccentric master’s work.
Lysenko was, in his lifetime, the central figure in Ukrainian music, and his relative obscurity today is probably due to Russian condescension.
(I sincerely hope he is not related to Stalin’s pet geneticist, the neo-Lamarckian crackpot, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, whose iron-fisted rule of Soviet biology ended the careers, and sometimes the lives, of hundreds of real scientists, as well as contributing to the famines that killed millions of Soviet peoples.)
“This and all concerts offered by the Santa Barbara Music Club are open to the public with free admission. For more about this concert, as well as future and past concerts, visit this website.