For the first week and a half of the Music Academy’s 75th Anniversary Summer Festival, the focus has been all but exclusively on the fellows as individual solo artists, performing in masterclasses and in the solo piano competition.
Now, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 25, in the Santa Barbara Bowl, we will get to witness the quasi-miraculous annual rebirth of that stellar ensemble, the Festival Orchestra (such a bland name for such an exciting band), performing the 75th Anniversary Community Concert.
The conductor will be Donato Cabrera, whose experience as music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-16 is very much to the point here. Currently, he is music director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and has a burgeoning international career..
The program for this concert consists of three works: Ludwig Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5 in c-minor, Opus 67 (1807), Arturo Marquez’s “Danzón No. 2, for Orchestra (1994),” and the Suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s great ballet, “Romeo & Juliet, Opus 64 (1935-1936).”
I daresay there is no one likely to attend this concert who has not heard “Beethoven’s Fifth”—for that matter, there is probably no one within earshot of electric media who has not hear at least the first four notes. It is the only work of Beethoven’s that is in any danger of becoming a cliché.
Yet, for that reason, it is certainly a valid entry on any Music Academy program, because, sooner or later, these kids are going to have jobs in an orchestra that has decided is time to schedule a performance of it. Familiarity is unlikely to lead to outright contempt: it’s too great a work.
Indeed, preparing to write this, I listened to all five of the recordings of it that I own (Pierre Monteux, Arturo Toscanini, Otto Klemperer, Kurt Graunke, George Szell), and I had a wonderful time. To be sure, I felt a slight twinge of dread before I began, but my fears invariably turned out to be groundless. I’m sure it’s blast to perform.
The Mexican composer, Arturo Marquez, born in 1950, stands in roughly the same relation to the folk and popular music of his country, as Aaron Copland stands to ours. Without the slightest perjoritive intent, I might say that he composes “Mexicana” in the same way that Copland composed “Americana.”
“Danzón No. 2” is a gorgeous work, but only the first part of it would be suitable for the stately, minuet-like dance that gives it its name. It has been choreographed as a ballet, and I’ll bet it’s dazzling. I don’t know if, like Copland, Marquez spent his early youth writing spikey, unlovable avant garde music, but if so, he has come to his senses in spectacular style.
I love Prokofiev’s ballets (I only admire Stravinsky’s). “Romeo and Juliet,” especially, seems to capture the actual feelings of Shakespeare’s young lovers in a way that no performance of the play that I have seen has managed to do. As dance theater or in the concert hall, every opportunity to see or hear it must be seized with both hands.
Tickets to this Community Concert are $10, with kids 7-17 admitted free with a ticketed adult. Tickets will be sold directly through the Santa Barbara Bowl, whose website is at https://sbbowl.com/concerts/detail/2022_06_25_music_academy_of_the_west.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at [email protected] The opinions expressed are his own.
