The new kids on our musical block, calling themselves the Santa Barbara Chamber Players, will offer their first concert of 2025, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 1 in the First United Methodist Church, 305 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
On the podium will be the international sensation (and Santa Barbara resident) Emmanuel Fratianni, conducting; and the exquisite soprano April Amante, supplying the vocals.
The program for this Winter Concert will include:
Emilie Mayer’s “Overture No. 2 in D-Major (1850),” Franz Schubert’s “Symphony No. 8 in b-minor, D-759, ‘Unfinished’ “(1822); and four pieces featuring soprano Amante:
Canteloube’s “Chants d’Auvergne” (1924-55); Giacomo Puccini’s “O mio babbino caro” from “Gianni Schicchi” (1918); and “Quando m’en vo” from “La Bohème” (1896); and Claude-Michel Schönberg’s “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Misérables” (1985).
As with so many of the talented female composers that we are just now starting to hear from, Mayer (1812-83) was quite popular and successful while she lived, and only disappeared from the concert halls due to the intransigent male bias of music historians (called “musicologists” in the United States).
She was a woman and, hence, of very little importance, historically or musically. Audiences and musicians, in fact, thought rather the world of her.
Of course, the old fogies couldn’t be more wrong. A few bars of her “D-Major Overture” and you know you’re dealing with the real thing.
Beethoven is obviously Mayer’s Pole Star. Wikipedia says of her compositional style:
“Emilie Mayer was initially influenced by the Vienna classic style, whilst her later works were more Romantic. Mayer’s harmonies are characterized by sudden shifts in tonality and the frequent use of seventh chords, with the diminished seventh allowing Mayer to reach a variety of resolutions.
“One defining characteristic of Mayer’s music is a tendency to set up a tonal centre with a dominant seventh, but not resolving to the tonic immediately; sometimes, resolution is skipped altogether.
“Her rhythms are often very complex, with several layers interacting at once. The first movements of her works usually follow a sonata-allegro form.”
[Note that we will hear a song by Claude-Michel Schönberg, not Arnold, so don’t worry.]
Tickets for the Winter Concert are $20, general admission; free for students ages 18 and younger.
For more about the concert, visit www.sbchamberplayers.org.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.noozhawk.com ’
