The Westmont College chamber ensembles, coached by Dr. Paul Mori, will play their Fall Concert at 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 27, in Deane Chapel, on the Westmont Campus, 955 La Paz Road, Santa Barbara.
Three separate ensembles will perform the program, starting with the Westmont Winds (Samila Aquino Holt, clarinet; Sophia Bartolo, bassoon) playing the No. 1 (Allegro commodo) from Ludwig Beethoven’s “Three duets for clarinet and bassoon, WoO 27” and Peter Schickele’s “Spanish Dance”; continuing with the Westmont Chamber Brass (Simon Janzen, Joshua Acuna, and Soren Warren, trumpets; Caroline Field, horn; William Mitsuk, trombone; and Chet Stussy, tuba) playing No. V from Alan Hovaness’s “Five Fantasies for brass choir, Opus 70 (1967)”; Charles Gounod’s “Marche romaine (1872, arr. A. Ostling)”; and the African-American spiritual “Go Tell it on the Mountain” (Traditional, Kelley/Williams); and concluding with the Westmont String Orchestra (Laura Dagg, Olivia Huebner, Caelia Moore, Laura Joy Phillips, Abbie Pryor, and Michael Rodriguez, violins; Noah Johnson and Karis Daley, violincellos) performing Henry Purcell’s “Trumpet Tune” (Arr. Latham); a “Polish Folk Dance Suite (4 Traditional Dances from the 16th and 17th Centuries, arr. Jacek Urbaniak)”; and movements III (“Menuetto”) & IV (“Presto”) from Wolfgang Mozart’s “Symphony No. 15, in G-Major, K. 124 (1772)”.
This program has very little need for exegesis. A few notes:
If a Beethoven work carries an “Opus” number, it was the composer who put it there, although the numerical order is not necessarily the chronological one. The designation “WoO” stands for “Werke ohne Opuszahl” (Work without Opus number), and the numerical and/or chronological order is of necessity speculative.
Most of the WoO works are things he wrote as a teenager — sometimes called, patronizingly, “juvenilia”—but I have found the ones I have heard to be fresh and exciting and altogether tuneful. Most musicologists consider the clarinet-bassoon duos of WoO 27, however, to be what they call “spurious.”
Alan Hovaness, born as Alan Vaness Chakmakjian, in Somerville, Massachusetts, identified himself as “Armenian” (though he chose a surname that doesn’t, unlike most of those who share this ethnicity — Aram Khatchaturian, for instance — rhyme with “Armenian”).
I have not heard this “fantasy,” though I have heard a great deal of Hovaness’s music, and I will hazard a guess as to how it will sound: mystical, slightly oriental, slightly medieval, and altogether sublime.
From 1773 to 1777, Mozart was employed in Salzburg, at the court of Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. The symphonies he wrote during this period, Nos. 14-30 — known, logically enough, as the “Salzburg Symphonies” — are “mature” in the sense that he had mastered the form, but they are very “youthful” in spirit: bright, energetic, full of inventions of grace and beauty.
Admission to this concert is free.
For more information, contact the music department at 805.565.6040.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.