Image: Giocomo Puccini
by Betty Oberacker
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. This concert features a wonderful variety of music from the Baroque, Romantic, Impressionistic, and Contemporary periods.
Program Details
(1680-1743)
- Allegro poco
- Andante
- Allegro
Isaac Kay, Matthew Maler, violins
Erik Fauss, viola
Tim Beccue, cello
(1685-1750)
- Allegro moderato
- Siciliano
- Allegro
Neil Di Maggio, piano
(b. 1964)
- I. Prelude: Awakening
- II. Nocturne (Smell)
- III. Touch
- IV. Taste
- V. Sigh (Hearing)
- VI. Lullaby (Sight)
- VII. The Witching Hour
Betty Oberacker, piano
Notes on the Program
by Betty Oberacker
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. This concert features a wonderful variety of music from the Baroque, Romantic, Impressionistic, and Contemporary periods.
The program opens with Antonio Vivaldi’s vivacious Concerto for Bassoon and Strings No. 6 in E minor, RV 484, performed by bassoonist Paul Mori with Isaac Kay and Matthew Maler, violins, Erik Fauss, viola, and Tim Beccue, cello. Vivaldi is recognized as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his reputation has come to center almost exclusively on the instrumental concerto, for the violin as well as a variety of other instruments. He composed over 500 concerti, in which he developed some of the most important aspects of that genre, such as the fast-slow-fast progression of movements and the “ritornello” arrangement of solo and orchestral passages. This important work highlights the effervescent character and sensitive instrumental treatment for which the composer is renowned.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s cheerful Sonata No. 2 in E-flat major, BWV 1031 follows, interpreted by flutist Andrea Di Maggio and pianist Neil Di Maggio. Comprising three movements, the sonata follows the pattern familiar from Vivaldi concerti rather than the four-movement chamber and church sonatas of the decades immediately preceding its composition. So too, the work features light textures, simple yet elegantly refined harmonies, and highly ornamented melodic lines so typical of the newly emerging galant style of the 1730s. The interplay between the two instruments is delightfully conversational, with the keyboard part remaining independent of – yet always complementary to – the flute part.
Next, Santa Barbara composer and pianist Leslie Hogan presents her Suite for the Senses (2014). In Dr. Hogan’s words, the work is “a series of brief movements written in response to a set of poems by David Shaddock, a poet and therapist based in Berkeley, California, framed by a freely-imagined Prelude and Postlude. Since it’s pretty much impossible to ‘represent’ the senses in music, my main compositional strategy was to respond to the rhythm of the words, the rhetorical devices in the poems, and the expressive world of the poems. … I performed two movements at the Spoleto Festival, Spoleto, Italy, as part of a panel entitled Art, Creativity and Self-psychology: Aesthetic Gesture in the Arts, Self-experience, and Psychoanalyis, with David reading his poems. The complete work was premiered in April 2014 on an Ensemble for Contemporary Music Concert here in Santa Barbara.”
Soprano Deborah Bertling and pianist Betty Oberacker will conclude the program with four intensely dramatic arias from some of Giacomo Puccini’s most beloved operas. Ms. Bertling has entitled the presentation “Puccini’s Desperate Divas,” and most appropriately so, as the selections comprise the tearfully pleading “Signore, ascolta!” (“My Lord, Listen!”), sung by Liu in the opera Turandot; the achingly heartfelt “In quelle trine morbide” (In Those Soft Lacy Curtains”), sung by Manon in the opera Manon Lescaut; the splendidly rapturous “Chi’il bel sogno di Doretta potè indovinar?” (“Who Could Guess Doretta’s Beautiful Dream?”), sung by Magda in the opera La rondine; and the poignantly moving “Vissi d’arte” (I Have Lived For Art”), sung by Tosca in the opera Tosca.
The Performers
Paul Mori, bassoon, received his earliest start in music through school music programs here in his native Santa Barbara and continued his musical education at Westmont College. From here, he relocated to Baltimore to study at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, earning a master’s degree in bassoon performance with Phillip Kolker and later completing a doctorate in orchestral conducting, studying with the legendary Frederik Prausnitz. He served as music director of orchestras in the Pacific Northwest and Baltimore before returning to Santa Barbara. Currently, he conducts the Santa Barbara Reading Orchestra and is on the music faculty at Westmont College.
Isaac Kay, violinist, is a senior at Westmont College, majoring in Music Performance and studying with Dr. Han Soo Kim. He studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music during his high school years, and was a principle player in the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra. Isaac has performed in the Brevard and Credo Chamber Music Festivals and the Stringendo School for Strings.
Matthew Maler, violinist, is currently a junior at Westmont College, studying philosophy and performing with the Westmont Orchestra. He has performed in several Westmont theater productions in both acting and musical roles, and is engaging in research in preparation for graduate study in philosophy.
Erik Fauss is a freelance violist and singer/songwriter. He is currently finishing his Masters at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Juan-Miguel Hernandez and Helene Clement. Before moving to London, Fauss completed his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. In the Fall of 2016, he studied with Matthias Maurer and Thomas Selditz in Vienna and Yuta Nishiyama at the University of Arts in Berlin.
Timothy Beccue, cellist, has won numerous awards for his performances spanning North America and Europe, including First Place in the 2018 SB Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation Competition. He graduated with a physics degree from Westmont College, where he studied cello with Trevor Handy, has been soloist with the Westmont Orchestra and West Coast Symphony, and contracts as substitute cellist with the SB Symphony. In addition to his musical pursuits, he works with robotic telescopes at Las Cumbres Observatory.
Andrea Di Maggio, Flutist, graduated from San Jose State University, summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Music degree where she studied with Isabelle Chapuis. While attending Arizona State University, Andrea held a teaching position and worked with the undergraduate flute majors and music education students, and performed in faculty recitals. Studying with Jill Felber at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Andrea graduated with honors with a Masters Degree in Flute Performance. As flute instructor at Westmont College, she is a founding member of the woodwind quintet Sonos Montecito and a faculty member at the Westmont Academy of Young Artists. Andrea also maintains a small and competitive private flute studio, with students winning awards from the Santa Barbara Music Club, The Music Teachers Association of California, and the National Flute Association. Andrea performs on a Miyazawa flute.
Neil Di Maggio, pianist, enjoys a dual career as solo and collaborative pianist and as a researcher for Westmont College. His performing career has taken him from California to Phoenix to New York City, and he recently served on the faculty of the Westmont Academy for Young Artists. He earned his BM Degree, summa cum laude, from San Jose State University, MM Degree from the San Francisco Conservatory, and MM Degree in Collaborative Piano from UCSB, studying with Paul Berkowitz Anne Epperson, and Yael Weiss. Currently Director of Research in the Office of College Advancement at Westmont, Neil maintains a private piano studio, and his students are frequent award winners with the Santa Barbara Music Club and the Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation competitions.
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.
Deborah Bertling (Soprano) earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at Bob Jones University, Greenville, SC. She also earned a certificate at American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles. She has performed in dozens of operas, plays, and concerts throughout California, most recently in Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica with Opera Santa Barbara. She is President of Performing Arts Scholarship Foundation, 1st Vice President of Community Arts Music Association, music docent in local elementary schools and mentor with Royal Family Kids. She will appear in the world premiere full-length feature film, Mirror Of My Soul, March of 2017. www.deborahmarksbertling.com
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.
