Tag archives: Music Academy
Another longstanding Santa Barbara-based chamber music program also launches its new season this weekend, as the Santa Barbara Music Club opens its 56th series of concerts featuring purely pianists. The “Six Hands at One Piano: Romantic and Modern Perspectives” program, slated for 3 pm on Saturday, September 27, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (4575 Auhay […]
The SCAPE artist group, aka Southern California Artists Painting for the Environment, held its annual juried exhibit in Lehman Hall at the Music Academy of the West Montecito (MAW) on Friday, September 12 – Saturday, September 13. The artists participating in the show render original works depicting the Central Coast of California, local landscapes created […]
The Music Academy of the West ended its annual summer festival on a high note at the Granada with the Academy Festival Orchestra, under conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya, playing Mahler’s “Symphony No. 3 in D Minor.” The stellar performance featured Julia Holoman, mezzo-soprano fellow, the children’s troupe Sing! and the Music Academy Women’s Chorus. Stirring stuff… […]
Music Academy of the West’s summer festival and its 100-something event season has moved to the rear-view mirror after last weekend’s triumphant performance of Mahler’s Third at the final Academy Festival Orchestra symphony concert, complete with the MAW women’s chorus (which sprinkled in eight LVI fellows) and the Sing! Children’s Choir. But there’s only a […]
Music by and at the Music Academy of the West also returns shortly courtesy of both the third season of its Mariposa Concerts, which feature pre-concert wine receptions before the Hahn Hall performances, and a pair of special intimate fundraising concerts with longtime MAW faculty artists billed as “Up Close & Unforgettable.” Mariposa makes its […]
The end is here. Just three more days remain in the Music Academy of the West’s 2025 Summer Music Festival. But there are still nine events to choose from, including master classes in Bassoon, Violin, Trombone & Tuba, Lehrer Vocal Institute songbirds on Thursday, August 7, and Oboe and Solo Piano on Friday, August 8. Thursday […]
After the extravagant production of the doom and gloom-infused morality and reckless wreckage-and-punishment tale of Don Giovanni at the Granada in mid-July, things turn a bit frothier and lighthearted with the Music Academy of the West Lehrer Vocal Institute’s performance of one-acts. Stripped down to the bare essentials and staged much more intimately at Hahn […]
Time was, one could reasonably assume that seeing the classic film musical The Music Man would launch a new generation of trombonists (after all, they did lead the big parade, with 110 cornets right behind). Nowadays, not so much. But Music Academy of the West trombone fellow Sarah Roshani Goldberg had a more circuitous, if […]
Opera director Mo Zhou made her Music Academy of the West debut two summers ago with a reimagining of La bohème – from 1830s Paris to Brooklyn in 2011. This weekend, Zhou and the talented MAW vocal and instrumental fellows take on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with the director moving the time and place from Spain […]
It was an evening of high note when the Music Academy of the West hosted its annual gala for a record 410 guests on the Upper Lawn of the Montecito Club, raising $750,000 to support life-changing programming and the 78th summer festival with 150 fellows, out of 2,000 applicants from 19 countries worldwide. “It helps […]
It’s a good bet that, unlike Scott Pingel, none of the other Music Academy of the West teaching artists on campus this summer have played a concert with the mega-selling rock band Metallica – or for that matter, any concert in front of some 20,000 people. It was back in September 2019 that double bassist […]
Dennis Michel still vividly remembers the first time he ever heard the bassoon as a seven-year-old boy growing up on a 480-acre farm in northern Idaho. “Through the magic of television I saw a Leonard Bernstein Young Person’s Concert with the New York Philharmonic, and they had a teenage bassoon soloist for Haydn’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante,’” […]
The buzz of background conversations and tinkling of cups and silverware were the soundtrack when Andy Akiho picked up the phone last Friday at noon. Not surprisingly, the percussionist-composer was in a coffeehouse in Portland – where he lives when he’s not in New York – but he wasn’t just picking up a cup of […]
Violinist Randall Goosby, the first Mosher Guest Artist of the summer, will have already performed his MAW recital by the time this issue hits newsstands, but there’s still an opportunity to hear the 2022 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient – which he was awarded at age 25 – in the June 28 Academy Festival Orchestra […]
Great White sharks are known to patrol the waters off Santa Barbara and even the coastline on a regular basis – an occasionally toothy swim zone barely a few hundred yards away from the Music Academy’s Miraflores campus. Tonight’s opening concert –by the fellows-powered Academy Festival Orchestra (AFO) – takes place Saturday night at the […]
Then-Juilliard graduate student violinist Anthony Chan got quite a shock when he opened an email from the Music Academy of the West in spring 2024 to check on his chamber music assignments for the summer festival. “I was just curious where the other fellows I’d be playing with might be studying, and then I saw […]
The Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall was totally energized when UCSB Arts & Lectures hosted captivating violinist Tessa Lark in her Santa Barbara debut with pianist Amy Yang, director of chamber music and piano studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. Béla Bartók’s “Romanian Folk Dances” kicked off the concert also featuring Eugène […]
The Music Academy of the West season is still a solid six weeks away when 150 fellows will arrive on the Miraflores campus in Montecito and, alongside 60 faculty members, collaborate in creating a truly astonishing slate of events over the otherwise fallow months on the classical calendar. There are nearly 125 in-person opportunities in […]
Owls, a New York-based string quartet collective, wooed the audience at the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall with their original, visceral performance, part of UCSB Arts and Lectures. The entertaining foursome, which unusually included two cellists rather than two violinists – Gabriel Cabezas and Paul Wiancko, violist Ayane Kozasa, and violinist Alexi Kenney […]
Now in its 78th season, the Music Academy of the West’s annual summer festival, which runs from June 15 to August 9, offers an unparalleled blend of world class performances and musical discovery. Themed “Soundtrack to Summer,” the mega event showcases international artists performing alongside 150 of the academy’s gifted young musicians and 60 esteemed […]
