Image: Scott Joplin
On SATURDAY, October 21 at 3 PM, the SANTA BARBARA MUSIC CLUB will present another program in its popular series of concerts of beautiful Classical music. This concert will be held at the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library, 40 E. Anapamu Street. Admission is free.
One of the highlights of Santa Barbara Music Club’s concerts is the opportunity for audiences to hear great music from a variety of historical periods, with a diversity of musical forms, performed by excellent artists. As part of the library’s Centennial Celebration, this concert features American music spanning the past 100 years, with a special focus on that most American of genres, ragtime.
Program Details
(1918-1990)
Arr. Charlie Harmon
(b. 1952)
(b. 1938)
(1900-1990)
- Flowing
- Poetic, somewhat mournful
- Lively, with bounce
Christopher Davis, piano
Notes on the Program
Pianists Betty Oberacker and Eric Valinsky will open the program with Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, arranged by Charlie Harmon for piano duo. Premiered in 1956, Candide is an operetta with music composed by Leonard Bernstein, based on the 1759 novella of the same name by Voltaire. While the operetta closed after just 73 performances, the Overture, brilliantly scored and full of energy and lyricism, quickly became a popular concert piece. Charlie Harmon, who was Bernstein’s personal assistant and later his archivist, beautifully captures the energy of the orchestral overture in his arrangement.
Composer-Pianist Eric Valinsky will perform Magnetic Rag (1914) and Solace (1909) by Scott Joplin, Carmel-by-the-Sea – A Ragtime Postcard (1987) and Forget-Me-Not (1993) by Santa Barbara composer Hal Isbitz, and the premiere of his own Boondawgle – A Cake Walk.
Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was an African-American composer and pianist who achieved fame for his ragtime compositions and was dubbed the “King of Ragtime.” Magnetic Rag is notable in several respects: it is his last published work and in it Joplin pushed the boundaries of ragtime form, some critics even going so far as to suggest he was trying to merge ragtime elements with classical sonata form. Solace – A Mexican Serenade for Piano is also a musical hybrid, combining elements of the tango and the habañera.
Composer Hal Isbitz is a classically trained musician who studied composition and music theory with Dr. Ernest Kanitz, then Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California. A retired computer programmer, Hal began writing ragtime and other syncopated pieces in the mid-1970’s. His music has been recorded and performed at ragtime festivals throughout the country. Isbitz’s rags are characterized by a careful attention to counterpoint, memorable melodies, and sophisticated chromatic harmonies.
Eric Valinsky’s Boondawgle, a Cakewalk (2017) is adapted from the incidental music he wrote for The Boondawgle Estate, a play by Peter McDonough, produced last fall by DramaDogs. The piece is expressive of sentimentality, with a nod to the absurdity of life and to Brahms. A native Manhattanite, Valinsky earned his DMA in music composition from Columbia University. He is currently Music Director for the American Dance & Music Performance Group and moonlights as founder and partner of Inlineos LLC, a strategic Internet consulting company. He is President of the Santa Barbara Music Club Board of Directors.
Pianist Leslie Hogan will perform Marjorie Merryman’s Dog Day Rag (1997) and William Bolcom’s Contentment – A Rag (2015). Marjorie Merryman’s Dog Day Rag was commissioned by pianist Virginia Eskin in 1997, for her ragtime recording project Spring Beauties. According to the composer, “The title refers to the steamy New England summer days when the piece was written, perhaps inspiring some of the languid but restless chromaticism that flows through the work.” Merryman teaches composition at Manhattan School of Music, where she also served as Provost and Senior Vice President until 2017.
National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize, and Grammy Award-winner William Bolcom is an American composer of chamber, operatic, vocal, choral, cabaret, ragtime, and symphonic music. His Graceful Ghost rag is perhaps the best-loved work in the ragtime revival. Dedicated to his wife, the singer Joan Morris, Contentment-A Rag, composed in 2015 and premiered by Tom Brier at the 2015 West Coast Ragtime Festival in Sacramento, California, is a lyrical slow drag.
Flutist Adriane Hill and pianist Christopher Davis will conclude the program with Aaron Copland’s Duo (1971). Musically speaking, the Duo looks both back, to Copland’s distinctive folk-style ballets of the 1940s and the jazz inflections of some works from the 1920s; but also forward—there are elements of it that are not what the listener expects, if that listener isn’t familiar with Copland’s more challenging works.
The Performers
Christopher Davis, pianist, has been concerto soloist with several orchestras including the Northwest Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, and has studied with renowned teachers and scholars in Germany, Austria, and Portugal. He earned his BA Degree from UC San Diego, his MM Degree from the University of Arkansas, and his DMA Degree from UCSB. In addition to serving as the Music Academy of the West’s House Manager (2009-2016), Dr. Davis has been on the staff of the Ojai Music Festival and Westmont College (2014-2016), and has worked for Camerata Pacifica, collaborating independently with many of their musicians.
Adriane Hill Cleary is a flutist based in Santa Barbara, CA, where she works as the Marketing and Communications Manager for the UC Santa Barbara Department of Music. She studied performance at UC Santa Barbara (M.M.) with Jill Felber and the University of Central Florida (B.M.) with Dr. Nora Lee Garcia. As a member of the new music group, the Now Hear Ensemble, she has toured throughout much of California, including appearances at the Center for New Music in San Francisco and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles. Adriane also serves as the Marketing and Communications Manager for the Los Angeles-based composer-directed collective, Synchromy. Learn more at www.adrianehill.com.
Composer/pianist Leslie A. Hogan received her principal training at the University of Kansas and the University of Michigan. Her music often manifests her longtime fascination with other art forms and with the potential of music to reflect or respond to visual stimuli from the natural world. As a pianist, she has performed with UC Santa Barbara’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music and was a co-founder and frequent performer for the Current Sounds concert series in Santa Barbara. She was on the board of the Chamber Music Society of Santa Barbara for over a decade. She has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Fellowship, 2002; Charles Ives Scholarship, 1993), the Rapido Composition Contest, the American Music Center, ASCAP, and the Chicago Civic Orchestra, among others. >Dr. Hogan has taught composition in the College of Creative Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara since 1995.
Betty Oberacker, pianist, is internationally acclaimed for her interpretations of both traditional and contemporary solo and chamber music repertoire, and has toured throughout Europe, Israel, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the U.S., including performances at Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Berlin Philharmonic Hall and Vienna Musikverein. She has been Artist-in-Residence at 55 universities, conservatories and music festivals worldwide, and many important composers have dedicated their compositions to her. Her musical gifts were evidenced at three, when she began to play the piano and compose entirely by ear. Piano lessons started at age seven, and at nine she was accepted on scholarship as the only child student of the noted pianist Beryl Rubinstein. Her BM/MM Degrees are from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and her DMA Degree is from Ohio State University, where she was concomitantly a member of the piano faculty. Her discography includes Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Clavier Records), A Bach Commemorative Recital (MIT Great Performances Archives), Chamber Music of Emma Lou Diemer (Orion), Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (Century), John Biggs’ Variations on a Theme of Shostakovich (VMM), and Diemer’s Piano Concerto (MMC), the latter two works composed for Oberacker. Honors accorded her include a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Italy and the University of California Distinguished Teaching Award, and her students hold important positions as performers and teachers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. Dr. Oberacker is UCSB Professor Emeritus, and enjoys an active performing, teaching and chamber music coaching schedule.
A native Manhattanite, Eric Valinsky has, for more years than he would like to admit, maintained dual careers in computer systems architecture and music. He was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the University of Illinois, finally achieving his DMA in music composition from Columbia University. He studied composition with Walter Aschaffenburg, Salvatore Martirano, Jack Beeson, and Darius Milhaud; piano with Sara Crawford Drogheo and Emil Danenberg; and conducting with Harold Farberman. While living in Los Angeles, he became music director and composer-in-residence for The Storie-Crawford Dance Theatre Ensemble. Returning to New York, he served in a similar capacity for Danny Buraczeski’s Jazzdance, Uris Bahr and Dancers, and The New American Ballet Ensemble as well as composer-in-residence for The Rachel Harms Dance Company, Opera Uptown, and the Dance Department at City College of New York. He is currently Music Director for the American Dance & Music Performance Group and moonlights as founder and partner of Inlineos LLC, a strategic Internet consulting company.
This concert in the Faulkner Gallery is being presented through a partnership with the Santa Barbara Public Library.
