Over the past several years, Santa Barbara has enjoyed repeated encounters with the London Symphony Orchestra, thanks in part to a six-year partnership between the ensemble and the Music Academy of the West that’s now coming to a close.
The connection continued last week when the orchestra, in typically fine fettle, gave a concert on Tuesday, Feb. 18, at The Granada Theatre, co-presented by the Music Academy and the Community Arts Music Association of Santa Barbara. The performance marked the official end of this chapter of the partnership while also kicking off the orchestra’s current U.S. tour.
As a fitting addendum to the Granada program, LSO players also appeared in a chamber concert with Music Academy alumni the previous night at Hahn Hall.
The LSO’s grand finale in Santa Barbara had a certain buzz about it. With a tight two-work program spanning Gustav Mahler’s generally joyous Symphony No. 1 and Leonard Bernstein’s modernist-lite Serenade (After Plato’s Symposium), conductor Antonio Pappano and his orchestra summoned a big, clear, balanced sound. Dutch violinist Janine Jansen impressed with measured depth and subtlety in her treatment of Bernstein’s solo part, and all was relatively right with the world for a couple of hours.
The Serenade, whose five movements depict Plato’s dialogue on love — argued over by several characters — follows a similarly varied musical scheme. In its modal-hopeful airs, the score leans into echoes of Bernstein’s friend Aaron Copland. The rhythmically spiky “Socrates: Alcibiades” movement suggests the fight-dance sequence between the rival Jets and Sharks in Bernstein’s score to West Side Story.
Jansen’s eloquence and effortless range of expression and the LSO’s stylistic elasticity tracked with every sudden change in the score while still giving the piece an arcing narrative through line.
Mahler’s First Symphony may lack the cohesion and broiling, epic designs of his later works in the genre, but this piece has undeniable charm and infectiousness to its credit. The Austrian composer, only 27 when he began the symphony, hadn’t yet become the gateway to modernism, though this score hints at an artist with new ideas. The first movement opens ever so gently in a Wagnerian mist, before segueing into a spirited melodic gleam, a touch of foreboding, and a triumphant close.
The second movement’s almost boisterous good cheer shifts into a third movement that includes an identifiably Jewish klezmer section. The latter eases into gear with tolling timpani and a mournful solo cello part passed around the ensemble in a canon.
Sturm und Drang, of the sort more generously doled out in later Mahler, shows up in the final movement, as does a return to the tranquil mist of the opening. But now, the mist is thicker and less grounded in wide-eyed innocence.
Pappano and the LSO brought an illuminating clarity of vision to the symphony’s storyline. Although the tradition of the LSO in Santa Barbara may be coming to an end for now, opportunities to hear the orchestra in the Granada have contributed greatly to the collective musical memory of this town.
