Reviews

Academy Festival Orchestra, directed by Larry Rachleff – June 28, 2014

Heroically Heroic

Larry Rachleff seems to be the go-to man for whipping an orchestra into shape in short order. Patrons of the Music Academy of the West eagerly anticipate the Academy Festival Orchestra performances that, year after year, hit a high note while only a few short paces away from the Festival starting block. This year Maestro Rachleff, long-time director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic and director of Rice University’s Shepherd School orchestras, did double-duty with Academy Festival Orchestra performances capping both weeks one and two. On the first night of summer an orchestral subset played the newly renovated Lobero Theatre in a program of Richard Strauss for brass, and early symphonies by Prokofiev and Beethoven. A week later on June 28 at the Granada Theatre, Rachleff stood before full orchestral forces for—more Strauss for brass, and symphonies again by Prokofiev and Beethoven—this time the heroic Nos. 5 for each. Simply put, as one patron called to another on the street afterwards, “Wasn’t THAT energetic?!” Continue reading →

Santa Barbara Symphony, Saturday May 17, 2014

The Nir and the Far

Santa Barbara Symphony, Nir Kabaretti, Conductor, at the Granada Theatre, on Saturday, May 17.

Completing his eighth year leading the Santa Barbara Symphony, Maestro Nir Kabaretti has continued to demonstrate brilliance and warmth, high-level music making and accessibility. No one present Saturday would doubt the world-class artistry now regularly exhibited by the orchestra, nor the sensitive attunement of players to the maestro’s musical vision. Substantial fare included Antonín Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5. This reviewer overheard several patrons afterwards reconsidering their feelings about Shostakovich based on this powerful performance—and isn’t opening minds a yardstick for success by any measure? Continue reading →

Adelfos Ensemble, Tuesday June 10

A Tall Ship and a Star to Steer By

Adelfos Ensemble in concert at Trinity Episcopal Church on Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Most classical music groups have adjourned by late spring. After a flush of season finales in May, there suddenly falls a lull for music lovers, doldrums really. But recent years have witnessed one notable ship tacking to a different trade wind. I’m talking about that eighteen-voice wonder known as Adelfos Ensemble, directed for the past six years by early music expert and brilliant tenor, Temmo Korisheli. Last June Adelfos sang an exciting program of early American music, diverse in content, dense in substance, bright in execution, educational, ever surprising, and totally original. And this year’s June bloom went even further, with a fascinating program entitled, “Over the Stormy Ocean Tossed: Choral Songs of Seafaring, Adventuring, and Calamities.” What makes Adelfos so outstanding is partly the high skill set and musical maturity of its singers, many of whom are soloists and section leaders with other groups in town. They pull-off the harmonic heavy-lifting of tight intervals and funky key shifts with seeming intuitive ease. But the group also owes much to Korisheli’s bold thematic programming, scholarly breadth, and leadership skills that guide singers to master some very tough music. If there is one disappointment about Adelfos, it is only that they do not yet share more broadly what they so painstakingly prepare, season after season. Continue reading →

Bassist/Singer Kirstin Korb – Interview

“WHAT’S YOUR STORY?” TOUR

MONDAY, MAY 13, 2013 / SOhO RESTAURANT AND MUSIC CLUB

Kristin Korb finds her life moving in double time these days. The gifted jazz singer and bass player, who married in 2011 and moved to Denmark, is President-elect of the International Society of Bassists, and is frantically coordinating their annual conference next month.  Plus, Korb has just released a new album, What’s Your Story?—her sixth since her auspicious debut in 1996 with the Ray Brown Trio. A West Coast tour brings her, and her new material, to SOhO next Monday.

Your first album since your move to Denmark teams you with some powerful company: former Ray Brown Trio drummer Jeff Hamilton and USC faculty guitar wizard Bruce Forman.

The whole reason that I wanted to record with them is because they’ve been mentors of mine.  I’ve known Jeff for the last 20 years, and Bruce for about the last 10 years. I think as we change in our lives, and as we make some major shifts, I found I was going back to my iPod and listening to the things that I fell in love with.  I fell in love with jazz in the first place with the stuff that had grooves and a sense of fun and play and interaction between the musicians, and that’s the stuff that I really gravitated towards during my first year living in Denmark. One of the first things I did with Ray Brown was a vocalise for [the Count Basie tune] ‘Whirlybird’.  I found myself going back in to the vocalise thing again, going back into these songs that rely on the interplay, fun, friendship and trust that people have when they’re good friends.  Continue reading →

Awakening the sleeping sword of war

Happy Few presented by Ratatat Theater Group at Santa Barbara Veterans Memorial Bldg. on Friday, November 8, 2013.

Many Americans confuse Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and only register at some level that these two holidays have something to do with men and women in uniform. The more thoughtful might read a book, or watch a TV special. Actor and playwright Casey Caldwell has raised the thoughtfulness bar much higher. The Artistic Director of Ratatat Theater Group interviewed nearly two dozen local veterans, and then carefully meshed their words with a skeletal edit of Shakespeare’s Henry V. The result is Happy Few, a full body immersion into the passions and vagaries of war as experienced through the hearts and shattered nerves of those who know it best, a dramatic march in the combat boots of another. Continue reading →

Gem of the Ocean – Rubicon Theatre

GEM OF THE OCEAN

RUBICON THEATRE

PREVIEW BY JOSEPH MILLER

The late August Wilson once said that all his plays boil down to one short story called The Best Blues Singer in the World, which is told in one sentence: “The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.” But how does a drowning man sing, I wonder?

“Gem of the Ocean is all about the water,” Director James O’Neil told me by phone this week. The prospect of directing an August Wilson play is undoubtedly, well, august. The late playwright’s credentials include two Pulitzer Prizes and a Tony Award; a theater in New York City and a cultural center in Pittsburgh each bear his name. The American literary canon embraces his “Pittsburgh Cycle” of ten plays, which illustrate the African-American experience through each decade of the 20th Century. What’s more, the well-read Wilson packs his plays with mythic references not only from the Bible, but from Africa, and even Russian fairy tales. Continue reading →

Charles Lloyd and Sangam

Finding an Inner East

Sangam, featuring Charles Lloyd, Zakir Hussain and Eric Harland. At the Lobero Theatre. Saturday, Mar. 8, 8pm.

Previewed by Joseph Miller

There is a poem by Walt Whitman where the poet’s elastic identity migrates around the globe with the tides of humanity, from ancient Asia to modern America, only to end up facing west from California’s shore. With Manifest Destiny exhausted, the restless seeker can turn nowhere except within himself: “Where is what I started for so long ago / And why is it yet unfound?” The poem anticipated many seekers in the 20th Century who turned west to find an inner East. But few people illustrate the point better Continue reading →