Tag archives: music
Going back to its first concerts and recordings 50 years ago, Bay Area-based Kronos Quartet has made it a mission to revolutionize the string quartet as a living art form that not only sonically challenges the status quo but responds to the challenges of our era and issues. Dedicated to playing work almost exclusively by […]
The musician was shredding on his solos, fingers flying all over the instrument as the notes emerged with spectacularly blazing speed. The player’s face contorted and his body bent and swayed as he soared up to high notes that seem to defy the instrument’s capabilities. A rock guitarist raging at a local club? No. It […]
Santa Barbara Symphony wrapped its 71st season on a high note at the Granada with Mahler Meets Klezmer: Titans of Sound. The concert, conducted by veteran maestro Nir Kabaretti, featured Grammy and Juno-nominated clarinet soloist, band leader and composer David Krakauer. The entertaining musical journey started with Mozart’s Overture to The Abduction from the Seraglio, […]
UCSB Arts & Lectures packed the Arlington Theatre on two consecutive nights with jazz legend Herbie Hancock and a very different performance with drag queen RuPaul, who was promoting his new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings. Before 14 Grammy-Award-winner Hancock’s energized show with his extraordinarily talented quintet, a dinner was thrown at Villa & […]
Singer-songwriter Paula Cole was a household name back in the mid to late 1990s, when her commentary on gender stereotypes “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and “I Don’t Want to Wait,” picked up as the theme song of TV’s Dawson’s Creek, were all over the airwaves. She was nominated for seven Grammys, including Record, […]
Santa Barbara Symphony’s law-firm sounding April adventure makes its connections through klezmer, the traditional Jewish & East European music that often doesn’t get a lot of orchestral opportunities. After the concert opens with Mozart’s “Overture to Abduction from the Seraglio, K.384,” his first opera written in Vienna, David Krakauer takes another star turn as the […]
Campbell Hall at UCSB was the place to be when the popular Arts & Lectures program staged two more major entertaining concerts. The first was the Danish String Quartet, joined by Finnish cellist Johannes Rostamo, for the eagerly anticipated capstone to their Doppelgänger Project, which I have watched over the past three years at Campbell […]
Over a 60-hour period before finals, the Weller Organ in Deane Chapel, controlled by Professor Steve Hodson, will be playing “ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible)” by John Cage (1912-1992). This 1987 work explores how slowly a piece of music might unfold. Westmont’s performance will begin at 8 am on April 26 (with a rest) and […]
Last week saw two thrilling chamber orchestra performances of vastly different scopes in Academy of St. Martin in the Fields’ triumphant return to the Granada in a preview of its upcoming Marriner 100 celebration in London, and a charming concert with the local outfit Santa Barbara Chamber Players at First United Methodist Church. This week’s […]
It would be hard to overstate the popularity of The Academy of St Martin in the Fields, whose reputation and name recognition soared following its recording of all the music for the soundtrack of the 1984 film Amadeus, which occurred about halfway through the 50-year leadership of founding artistic director Sir Neville Marriner. The album […]
Social gridlock reigned at the Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall when VIP donors got a sneak peek at this year’s 77th annual summer festival “The Magic of Music.” Featuring 150 performances with more than 137 fellows between June 12 and Aug. 3, new academy president and CEO Shauna Quill outlined the many programs […]
Blues guitarist/singer-songwriter Chris Cain was already 30 before he formed his first band in 1986 in his hometown of San Jose, far from the blues meccas of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, or Chicago. In fact, even to this day, Cain has never lived anywhere else but northern California. But he’d grown up listening to his […]
Kenny Lee Lewis, bassist and backup singer for the Steve Miller Band since the early 1980s, has put together a five-piece band called THE FRENZ and secured half a dozen special guest singers and musicians with decades of combined rock history for a tribute show at the iconic Fillmore West in San Francisco and its […]
The choreography for State Street Ballet’s Cinderella has essentially never changed over the nearly 20 years since the family-friendly work premiered in town in 2005 and then went on a sold-out tour around the East Coast of the country. State Street founder and artistic director Rodney Gustafson created the piece just shy of the company’s […]
CAMA, the Community Arts Music Association of Santa Barbara. hosted its last concert of its current Masterseries with the 18-member Sphinx Virtuosi at the Lobero. The talented ensemble was founded in Detroit in 1997 to champion black and Latinx composers and musicians to bring more diversity to the arts. The tony troupe performed four commissioned […]
Two Westmont voice instructors will join forces in a recital, “A Song Celebration,” on Saturday, March 23, at 4 pm in Deane Chapel on Westmont’s lower campus. The performance is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the music department at (805) 565-6040. Tenor Chad Ruyle and soprano Nichole Dechaine, who […]
Dear Montecito! I miss you! I can’t wait to be home for Spring Break next week! I’m getting ready to finish my second year at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, and a lot has happened since the last time we spoke about my single “Oblivious,” which at the time was […]
Third-grader Tom Snow came home from school one day with the devastating news that most parents regard as the sum of their deepest fears. “I told my mom that I wanted to play the trumpet.” When the poor woman had regained her composure, she gently but firmly took Tom by the shoulders and aimed him […]
The Sphinx Organization was founded in Detroit back in 1997, and much like Motown Records more than three decades earlier, it has championed composers and musicians of color – in this case in the realm of classical music. Sphinx’s vision for more than three decades has been to make classical music more representative of our […]
Camerata Pacifica’s 2023-24 season continues at Hahn Hall on March 15 with a trio of seminal chamber works that evince the link between composers Brahms, Schoenberg and Pärt. Violinist Abigél Králik, who one critic praises as “a shooting star in the truest sense of the word,” makes her Camerata Pacifica debut on the program, which […]
