Music Academy of the West 2021 - read the reviews
Music Academy Chamber Orchestra concert with guest conductor Marin Alsop August 7 2021
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An amazing summer season ends in triumph
Last Saturday at the Granada Theatre, the Music Academy of the West Chamber Orchestra, with one of the world’s great conductors, Marin Alsop, at the helm, presented the last concert of the 2021 summer season. Masked but happy, everyone in the audience appreciated with gusto, the opportunity to engage with live music makers once again, after too long a hiatus on account of COVID-19. In the annals of the Music Academy of the West, 2021 will be remembered as one of the most important artistic renewals in the institution’s 74-year history.
Despite the unpredictability of the virus, the Music Academy administration and staff have pulled off a minor miracle this summer, bringing back, under difficult circumstances, an interactive experience between audience and performers. The Music Academy’s dynamic orchestral, chamber music, piano, and vocal training programs for young professionals jump-started with a roar, after so many challenges over the past year and a half. Next year’s 2022 summer season, it can safely be predicted, will be blockbuster.
Marin Alsop is no stranger to the opening work on Saturday’s program, Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986) written for and dedicated to the conductor. Orchestrated for the same brass instrumentation as Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) but with a larger percussion battery, Alsop knows every kink and curlicue, having conducted the piece countless times over the years. The result, a Puckish performance; facile, glittery, amusing, and virtuoso.
An adjustment of chairs to accommodate seating for strings and winds, and Alsop returned to conduct Alberto Ginastera’s Variaciones concertantes for Chamber Orchestra, Op. 23 (1953). A theme with several variations and sprinklings of virtuoso solo interludes, Alsop clearly selected this work to showcase the many talents, individual and collective, of the orchestra. Tricky meters, mood changes on a dime, brilliant wind, brass and string sectional flurries, pulsing rhythms, and stylish tympani licks - what’s not to like? In stunning command of each lovely calm and pitching tempest, Alsop was a marvel of fabulous musicianship and subtle conductorial handicraft. Bravi tutti!
Intermission still on the forbidden list at indoor events because of COVID, a quick reshuffling of winds and brass presaged the last piece on the program, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92. Known for its several fabulous horn licks, Alsop had some fun. Placing tympani dead center behind strings and winds, the conductor arranged trumpets on one side and the French horn section - two behind two, behind two - on the other side of the tympani, rather than in the usual horizontal line behind the winds. The result was fantastic, both in look and sound. A special shout out to the exciting, vigorous and entirely correct playing by whichever of the two tympanists listed on the program did the 7:30 Beethoven gig.
Luckily, in recent years interpreters have learned a lot more about Beethoven’s intended and clearly notated tempo markings. Forget the broken metronome theory. Beethoven wanted things to be energized and indicated so in his metronome markings. Relishing the new consciousness, Alsop gave the audience a refreshing romp through all four movements that soared and pitched, dove deep, and meditated quietly but with purpose, free at last, of a couple generations of misunderstanding.
Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review
Takács Quartet recital July 22 2021
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Takács Quartet: Schubert never heard it so good!
Last Thursday (July 22) a packed house at Hahn Hall on the Music Academy of the West campus welcomed Takács Quartet back to Santa Barbara with cheers and applause after a long Covid hiatus; the uproar, a kind of communal shout out of relief at the return, sort-of, to normal. Two works were on the program, Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810, “Death and the Maiden” and Brahms’ String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36. Academy Fellows Keoni Bolding viola, and Chas Barnard cello, joined Takács for the Brahms.
Personnel changes for string quartets are tricky. The sold-out house last Thursday anticipated the introduction of Takács Quartet’s newest member, violist Richard O’Neill. O’Neill has been a fixture on the Music Academy faculty for some years and has performed with Camerata Pacifica for many years here as well. O’Neill’s recent career moves have been exciting. Not only has he just joined Takács Quartet, his recording of American composer Christopher Theofanidis’ Concerto for Viola and Chamber Orchestra with the Albany Symphony, won this year’s Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo.
Long story short, Richard O’Neill is one of the most dynamic and visually thrilling violists on the planet today. As the newest “color” in Takács’ quiver, O’Neill would be one of four equal partners, not just now and again, but for years to come, performing hundreds of concerts as a member of one of the great string quartets of the world.
Schubert’s next to last and most famous string quartet No. 14 “Death and the Maiden” opened the program. Perhaps it was only me holding my breath before the fragile opening notes of the first movement, Allegro. The silence in the room anticipating those first notes - the initial aural test of Takács’ famous ensemble blend and interpretive integrity with their new violist - bespoke at very least, an intensely curious audience of serious Takács fans. Everyone in the room, especially the artists, knew what was expected, but didn’t know what to expect.
Having seen performances of Death and the Maiden by many dozens of quartets over several decades myself, Thursday’s performance by the ensemble - violinists Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes, cellist András Fejér, and violist Richard O’Neill - was hands down, the most breathtakingly exquisite interpretation of the work in my experience. Perfection in intonation, dynamic compass, style and balance, not unexpected at the highest levels, was crowned by an overall interpretation of the work that was fresh, fascinating, cerebral and chock-o-block with color and imagery. Did I mention style? If compassion is a musical style, Takács gave Schubert’s heartbreaking masterpiece one of the most moving and gentle interpretations in memory.
Technical prowess and ensemble bravura abounded, as in the variations of the Andante con moto, second movement. Takács’ edgy performance of the third movement, Scherzo: Allegro molto, was honey. Every note, each exclamation, every mood change, perfectly honed, styled and finished. The final movement, Presto, with its thrilling coda, gave the audience a collective case of the vapors, followed by roars of approval for a stunning interpretive endeavor!
After a short stretch break, Academy Fellows Bolding (viola) and Barnard (cello) joined Takács Quartet on stage for a fascinating performance of Brahms’ String Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36. In four movements, the work is from 1864-65, the composer in his early thirties. Takács’ performance revealed the quirkiness of the piece, with its interesting dissonances and experiments in harmonic movement, beginning with the passage for two violas that opens the work. Tweaked tonality in the third movement, Adagio, and a very nearly Elgarian tune in the last movement, Poco Allegro, gave all six artists opportunity to relish making music again together for a live audience.
Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review
Academy Chamber Orchestra concert Juiy 11 2021
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Cheers! The Academy Chamber Orchestra opens a post-Covid Granada Theatre with panache and not a few tears
Not since March 7 2020, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed its 100th anniversary concert in the venue for a gala sell-out CAMA crowd, has Santa Barbara’s Granada Theatre welcomed a free-flowing, non-masked, cheerful and chatty audience to its iconic post-modern, quasi-Spanish Revival performance space. Videotaped programs with limited in-house personnel behind those Covid-19 spit screens we’ve come to love and loathe, or the occasional Pavlovian experiment, inviting a dozen or so witnesses into the space, spacially segregated and masked, for special in-house private events, were the few intrusions into an otherwise tomb-like silence that embalmed the Granada for well over a year.
Last Sunday afternoon (July 11), the Academy Chamber Orchestra, under the spellbinding thrall of conductor Larry Rachleff, officially and without question effectively, gave back to a live performance-deprived audience, music that bathed hungry souls in the multiple nimbuses of youth, life, energy, camaraderie, sound itself, and the joy of people being with one another once again. The city’s too long shrouded premiere performing arts venue breathed anew, pulsed with the energy of human artistic endeavor, and a rekindled creative spirit. It’s been a long time coming, and it was epic.
An iconic artistic staple and survivor by its own right of passage and perseverance, the Music Academy of the West has managed Covid-19 with intelligence, rising anew and quickly, from a year and a half of semi-stasis. Conductor Rachleff reminded Sunday’s audience the young professional musicians of the orchestra behind him had arrived in Santa Barbara only the preceding Wednesday for their first ensemble rehearsal of any kind in over a year. Sunday’s concert was laudatory from the get-go, not least for this kind of discipline and conviction of Music Academy Fellows, who made transcendent, aural art together, after such a long hiatus.
Befitting an historic event such as Sunday’s concert, Australian composer Katy Abbott’s Punch for Brass Ensemble and Timpani (2013) opened the Academy Chamber Orchestra program with appropriate effusive energy, shaded by the composer’s occasional harmonic magical realism; an admixture of Punch and Judy rhythmic jollity and fanfare-like motives, hued occasionally in mysterious tonality and intention; casually perplexing forebodings to spice auditors’ speculation about subtext and meaning.
Next on the program, Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, K. 543, one of the composer’s most popular tune crunches, was performed with the casual insouciance of musicians ten times the assumed maturity of this fresh batch of Academy Fellows. Little wonder, as Rachleff led the orchestra through the symphony’s four movements with particular attention to phrasing, nuanced cadenzas and performance practice styling in situ with lovely, delicate balances and clean articulation, a breathtakingly subtle performance.
Leading from memory, as he had with the Mozart symphony, Rachleff saved his final surge of conductorial invictus for the last work on the program, Stravinsky’s 1919 suite from the ballet Firebird. Centering the Academy Chamber Orchestra on its primary mission, to wow the audience with virtuosity, Rachleff led his charges, now centered and feeling their oats, through a performance that was at once colorful and athletic, the Holy Grail of Stravinsky’s transparent genius, achieved. The famous tune in French horn, harkening the ballet’s final denouement and apotheosis, brought the audience to its feet and soiled not a few hankies with tears of joy. Wonderful.
Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review