Santa Barbara Music Club Concert

“FROM THE NEAR SHORE TO THE FAR HORIZON”

The Santa Barbara Music Club continues its 2022-2023 season of beautiful classical music on Saturday, March 11, at 3 PM, at First Congregational Church, 2101 State Street.  Admission is free.

The acclaimed Emergence String Quartet will perform 10 short and intriguing works by regional composers exploring our natural environment: the quartet will interpret music that reflects the Sespe, examines the shoreline, listens to the trees, honors the bees, and shouts back at the birds.

The composers who have generously contributed their creative mastery to this project are David Campbell: 21st Century Entanglements (2020), Pauline Frechette: The Sacred Mountains of Ojai (2017), Greg Haggard: Sespe Suite (2022), Leslie Hogan: String Quartet No. 4 (2022), Ashley Hoyer: Emergence (2021), Raul Kottler: Fragment of a Nebula (2020), Karen Goulding: A Hive for the Honeybee (2022), Jim McCarthy: For All That’s Left (2022), Laura Mihalka: Gibralter Road (2020), and Kerenza Peacock: The Whispering Tree (2022).

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British violinist Kerenza Peacock now enjoys living in Los Angeles, and her albums as a soloist with London Symphony Orchestra and Royal Philharmonic all reached the top of the classical charts. She led the Pavão String Quartet in 5 albums and 15 years of tours worldwide, has recorded with Sir Paul McCartney, Harry Styles, and Barbra Streisand, and was Concertmaster of Adele’s Orchestra in Las Vegas.  Having studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, she was appointed an Associate of that institution for making “a significant contribution to the music industry.”  Kerenza recently gathered 94 violinists from 29 countries to play in harmony with Ukrainian violinists in their bomb shelters; the video went viral, being played on primetime news in dozens of countries.

Maya Magub is a British violinist working in Los Angeles. She has played for numerous movies and records, been a concerto soloist in London’s Royal Albert Hall, given solo performances for King Charles III and Stephen Hawking, and was invited to Buckingham Palace where she met Queen Elizabeth II. A graduate of Cambridge University, she has played in chamber music festivals in Belgium, France, Iceland, India, the UK, and the USA, and has made four critically acclaimed recordings for the CRD label: “It makes listening to this performance a really joyous experience … Maya Magub succeeds in leading the listener through Telemann’s maze of musical mini-experiments with so much engagement that it is impossible to turn them off until they’re finished.” (Gramophone).

Violist Karen Long is a freelance musician who has performed with many orchestras in the Southern California region, including the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, New West Symphony, Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Santa Barbara Opera Orchestra, and the Santa Barbara Symphony.  She is grateful for her wonderful teachers:  Oscar Raoul Iotti, Wayne Crouse, Heidi Castleman, and Pamela Goldsmith.  A native of Tucson, Arizona, she is a former Principal Violist of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and now happily resides with her family at Hollywood Beach in the beautiful Channel Islands Harbor.

“Accomplished cellist Virginia Kron … has done her best to keep alive the music of our time,” says the Los Angeles Times. Of special note is her premiere of John Biggs’ Cello Concerto with the New West Symphony and subsequent recording with the Czech National Symphony. She has long assisted UCSB’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music with featured festival performances and in the recording studio. “To a composer, Virginia is what you can only hope for a scant number of times: a performer that will absolutely l-i-v-e with what you’ve written until she can make it leap off the page and into sound space… the seasoned player who will devote the time necessary to allow the music to cure,’ when it may even take on a lovely ‘patina’ you didn’t know was there!” (Jeremy Haladyna, UCSB).

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Santa Barbara Music Club concerts display an incredible diversity of historical musical periods and compositional styles, including beloved masterworks and exciting new and seldom-heard repertoire.

Of the series, the Santa Barbara Independent exclaimed:  “A beautiful day, a beautiful room, beautiful music … who could ask for more?” and Gerald Carpenter in Noozhawk.com declared, “Every Santa Barbara Music Club concert that I have ever attended has been a sensory joy as well as a consciousness expansion.”

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A valued cultural resource in the community since 1969, the Music Club’s mission is threefold:

(1) Presentation of an annual series of concerts, free to the public.

(2) Aiding and encouraging musical education by the disbursement of scholarships to talented local music students.

(3) Presentation of community outreach activities, including bringing great music to residents of area retirement homes.

For information on this or other Santa Barbara Music Club programs and performing artists, visit SBMusicClub.org.

For the health and safety of our audience and performers:

Masks are required and must cover both the nose and mouth.  Social distancing is required.