The Santa Barbara Symphony continues its 65th Anniversary season with a performance of Amadeus Live, featuring guest conductor Dirk Brossé, pianist Natasha Kislenko, and the Santa Barbara Symphony choir, 8 p.m. Saturday, March 16, and 3 p.m. Sunday, March 17, at The Granada Theatre.
Audience members can experience the multi-Academy Award winning 1984 movie Amadeus on the Granada’s 4K digital cinema screen, while Mozart’s most celebrated works are performed live in-sync by the Santa Barbara Symphony, accompanied by the Santa Barbara Symphony Chorus.
Winner of eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Milos Foreman’s Amadeus is a sensation. It tells the story of Vienna court composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and the envy that consumes him as he discovers the virtuosic talents he has longed for in the young, new composer Mozart (Tom Hulce).
“Amadeus weaves a beautiful, tragic fable, enchanting to children and adults alike. It has gore, a pact with God, celebrity, a masked stranger, murder and some of the best music ever written. What other film offers half as much?” reports The Guardian.
Brossé comes to the Santa Barbara Symphony from Pennsylvania, where he serves as music director of The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.
Born in Ghent, Belgium, Brossé began his music studies at the Music Conservatories of Ghent and Brussels. He subsequently specialized in conducting, which he studied in Maastricht, Vienna and Cologne.
Outside of conducting for prestigious orchestras in Belgium, Brossé has conducted for the London Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonic Orchestra of Shanghai, and l’Orchestra de l’Opéra de Lyon.
He has written and composed some 200 works, including concerti, oratorios, lieder, chamber music and symphonic works that have been performed all over the world and have been recorded in more than 40 countries.
Playing alongside the Symphony and Symphony Chorus will be pianist Kislenko. Kislenko is a continuing lecturer in UCSB’s Department of Music, with a successful performing career that has taken her across her native Russia as well as continental Europe and South America.
She holds graduate degrees in piano from the famed Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and earned her doctor of musical arts degree in piano performance from Stony Brook University, N.Y.
Special acknowledgment goes to principal concert sponsor, The Samarkand.
For tickets, visit https://ticketing.granadasb.org/single/PSDetail.aspx?psn=11500, or call the Granada Box Office, 805-899-2222. To learn more about the Santa Barbara Symphony and how to support the organization and its programming, visit www.thesymphony.org/.
— Jennifer Zacharias for Santa Barbara Symphony.