The Santa Barbara Music Club offers a free concert 3 p.m. this Saturday, Dec. 7, at the First United Methodist Church, 305 E. Anapamu Street.

The music begins with oboist Adelle Rodkey and pianist Eric Valinsky playing François Poulenc’s “Sonata for Oboe and Piano” (1962),  followed by pianist and scholar of Argentinian music Kacey Link playing Astor Piazolla’s “Three Preludes for Piano” (1989),  his “Adiós Nonino” Tango Rhapsody (1959), and Alberto Ginastera’s “Milonga” (1938), Ginastera’s piano transcription of his song “Canción al Arbol del Olvido (Song to the Tree of Forgetfulness), Opus 3.”

No composer of the twentieth century enriched the literature for wind chamber music more than François Poulenc (1899-1963). The “Oboe-Piano Sonata,” composed in the final year of his life, occupies a special place in my heart. I first heard it in 1965, on a Nonesuch record, issued that year. Poulenc’s signature sound of ironic melancholy is nowhere so perfectly realized than in this piece. It sounds almost trivial, but it stays with you. 

For the past several decades, I have observed the rise in popularity of the works of the Argentine composer and bandoneon player Astor Piazolla (1921-1992). His music appears on our concert programs with increasing frequency, and I have gone to listen as often as I could, hoping that I would hear something that explained my colleagues’ enthusiasm. So far, though I readily concede his fluency, I have yet to hear something that spoke, as the Quakers say, to my condition. But I keep hoping.

Whatever you think of the Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983), if you have not heard “Milongo,” or the song on which it is based, you are going to make room for a whole new side of his music in your opinion. The original “Canción al Arbol del Olvido,” is the greatest song I have yet heard by a Latin American composer—it is on par with the “Tonadillos” of the Spaniard Enrique Granados, who died in the year of Ginastera’s birth—and if I went in for issuing guarantees, I would offer one about your approval of this work.

Gerald Carpinter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.