Music Academy Brought Timely Berlioz, Denk’s Sublime Bach to Santa Barbara for Solstice

To twist the opening line of Garrison Keillor’s “Lake Wobegon” radio feature, it was decidedly not just another quiet week with the Music Academy. Topping the list of Academy concerts in the past week — and joining the list of the profound classical events in Santa Barbara all year — was Jeremy Denk’s sublime performance of five out of the six Bach partitas for keyboard. It was a seriously deep musical offering, leavened by the wit and energy of Bach’s writing and Denk’s predictably charismatic verbal program notes.

A bigger splash of sound came in the form of the first of several Academy festival orchestra concerts, boldly conducted by Stéphane Denève. The all-Berlioz affair made for a surprisingly Summer Solstice-compatible Saturday night soiree at the Granada Theatre.

Denk, surfing in the upper echelon of internationally renowned pianists and an Academy faculty member in recent years, has made his annual recitals in Hahn Hall one of the hotter tickets on the Academy’s concert calendar, not to mention the broader 805 classical calendar. He often brings to bear a specific programmatic angle, and this year’s Bach partita focus proved to be an especially rewarding and artist-revealing world unto itself.