This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on March 4, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard’s music newsletter in your inbox each Thursday, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
It is customary that, in the “serious” music circles, April brings it on. We can count on various presenters to steer their seasons to some of its most formidable programming in this springtime holy month. In Santa Barbara this year, that tradition stands. It’s time to take stock of the many tempting concert options and get outta the house.
On Tuesday of this week, CAMA ended its luminous (if slightly truncated) season on the high note(s) of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields stirring up sonic splendor at the Granada. Joshua Bell appeared as violinist-leader, and the program boasted a brand-new piece, Flight of Moving Days, by noted jazz-classical composer Vince Mendoza, with percussionist Douglas Marriner in a spotlight of a work in tribute to his grandfather and Academy founder Sir Neville Marriner.
April’s slate of calendar-marking concerts includes two of the world’s premier — and more forward-thinking — string quartets at Campbell Hall, hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures. The Danish String Quartet ends its Doppelgänger series with a new Thomas Adès piece, on Tuesday, April 10 (see story here ), and the bellwether new-minded Kronos Quartet , a frequent visitor to Santa Barbara over the decades, stops here on Saturday, April 27, as part of its grand 50th anniversary. (Is that possible? They seem so forever young.)
Over in the Santa Barbara Symphony corner, this month’s program tilts in an Israeli/Jewish direction with its Mahler Meets Klezmer: Titans of Sound program, combining Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” and idiomatically nimble klezmer advocate/apostate David Krakauer performing Polish-born film composer Wlad Marhulets’s Concerto for Klezmer Clarinet. Opera Santa Barbara closes another engaging and varied season on a contemporary and Spanish theme, with Hector Armienta’s 2022 version of Zorro, at the Lobero Theatre April 19 and 21.