Brittner-sweet Memories

Santa Barbara Historical Museum was socially gridlocked for the farewell bash of executive director Lynn Brittner who is leaving after four years to take a similar position with the Indian Pueblo Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“I have made many friends here and we have made many advances in my time here,” says Lynn, who was accompanied by her loyal 11-year-old Golden Retrievers, Tyson and Hunter.

Museum board chair Sharon Bradford presented Lynn with an oil painting of the Grand Tetons by Alexander Dzishuski, a 1990 graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago, which had hung in her office during her tenure.

Among the 75 guests turning out to bid her adieu were Missy DeYoung, Sigrid Toye, Luke Swetland, Journal history columnist Hattie Beresford, George Burtness, Joan Tapper, Ernestine De Soto, Eleanor Van Cott, Adriana Ortega, and Karl Hutterer.

High Notes

Opera singer and actress Deborah Bertling put her vocal skills to work narrating at Santa Barbara Symphony’s latest concert at the Granada with veteran conductor Nir Kabaretti.

Deborah, president of the Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation and a board member of CAMA, accompanied Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Variations, and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell before Italian-based pianist Alexander Romanovsky showed off his undoubted keyboard skills with Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major.

The 34-year-old Ukrainian’s technique was quite dazzling, meriting two standing ovations and an encore. No wonder he was asked to perform for Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.

The entertaining concert wrapped with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor.