MAW Music: Competition Winners Congregate for Concerts
The official launch of the Music Academy of the West’s special 75th anniversary summer festival is still more than two months away, but in the span of less than three weeks, Santa Barbara will have been witness to the wildly divergent extremes offered by the revered institute. Hot on the heels of three landmark performances at the Granada by the large London Symphony Orchestra, MAW heads for a much more intimate concert series at Hahn Hall, featuring the winners of its 2021 fellows competitions presented in sequence for the first time.
Each of the recitals – for which the winners also received a $5,000 cash prize – features world premiere commissions by notable composers who also served as judges last summer. Duo Competition winners violist Keoni Bolding and pianist Melivia Raharjo will play works by Strauss, Debussy, Morricone, and Rebecca Clarke, among others, along with the premiere of Conrad Tao’s “Churn”on April 5. Solo pianist Hsin-Hao Yang performs Busoni, Haydn, Kapustin, and Liszt surrounding Tyshawn Sorey’s commission on April 6. And Marilyn Horne Song Competition winners tenor Shawn Roth and pianist Alexander Solowaykick off their April 7 performance with Carlos Simon’s “Vocalise” before tackling pieces by Britten, Liszt, Schumann, and Tosti, representing an expansion of the program that won them the prize last summer.
“It was my second time in the competition, and I’d been able to train my voice in a way that allowed me to get that fullness and power, while honing it to showcase that part of my voice that’s a floaty thing I discovered that I could do,” Roth said, speaking from a park bench in Central Park after winding up weekend rehearsals with Soloway in New York City last Sunday. The discovery was part of the two-year process that came from converting from baritone to tenor after he’d already been accepted to MAW back in 2019. “It was some of the strongest vocal showcasing I’ve ever done, and with two more years of preparation, more artistry in general became available.”
Roth said the choice to expand their winning competition into an hour-long program was simply to stick with “what we consider to be just really beautiful music.” That meant singing the full “Liederkreis Op. 39” by Schumann as the centerpiece, which Roth called “the most intimate style of music, and Alex is a perfect pianist for it, because he has the right colors in his head.”
Roth said debuting Simon’s Vocalise – which consists of three movements all based on the sound “ah” – is challenging even though he “let slip” on a Zoom call (with Simon) that he had been first chair in the state for vocal jazz during high school.
“The great challenge/reward is that you don’t have the luxury of looking up someone else’s interpretation,” he said. “So it’s like being an archeologist in a way digging in to see what the music is trying to imply, what goes beyond the page, to create your own colors with the music.”
Roth, who is now a fellow at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia, and Soloway, currently winding up his first year of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, will also be performing “O might those Sighs and Tears” from Britten’s The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, supplementing a reprise of the composer’s “The Last Rose of Summer,” which the singer termed “So beautiful and so haunting.”
In fact, he said, choosing that song might have cemented his victory. “It’s almost like we cheated by picking the most beautiful English song ever written.”
