A Time to Celebrate Promise of the West

SANTA BARBARA —  It seems almost laughable now, the founding of the Music Academy of the West here, 50 years ago, by the then-music critic of this paper, Isabel Morse Jones.

For the previous decade Los Angeles had been, by any reasonable standards, one of the most important musical cities in the world. After all, Klemperer had been the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the two greatest composers of the first half of the century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, lived here; local musicians included the likes of Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Rubinstein and Szigeti. Yet the myopic great schools of the East, Juilliard and Curtis, discriminated against students from out West, figuring they couldn’t possibly be qualified.

They, of course, were. And though Southern California is no longer quite so musically well-connected, they still very much are.

The point was driven home with considerable force for the academy’s 50th anniversary gala Friday night at the Lobero Theatre by two alumnae who became stars, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne and soprano Benita Valente.

Horne and Valente have returned to carry on the tradition of the musician most closely associated with the academy, Lotte Lehmann, the imposing German soprano who retired to Santa Barbara in 1950 and who turned the academy into a renowned opera workshop, holding sway over the institution until her death in 1976.

And at the end of the recital, Horne, who takes over the voice department this year, repeated to the assembled students what Lehmann had said to her. Everything has its time. Hers is over, now it is theirs.

That lesson--when to stop--is, however, the lesson no teacher ever really manages to teach a young singer. Horne and Valente have reached the point where their physical abilities and musical wisdom diverge. Horne is a little luckier, in that her chocolate mezzo has less shine to lose in the first place. Valente, so admired for her luminous purity of tone and temperament in music quite old and quite new, is more exposed.

Still, both singers retain the essential abilities to melt hearts and to delight. They know the stage, and they know a wide range of music. It was particularly interesting the way years seemed to drop as the music got older. Horne captured the quintessence of suffering in a beautiful anonymous aria from the early 17th century “Cloris Sighed.” Valente reminded us of the exquisite focus she has always brought to early music in an anonymous song, “Have you Seene but a Whyte Lillie grow,” from the same period.

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Half of the recital was duets, and that is a trickier business, since the acoustics of paired voices can be friend and foe. When foe--that is, when vibratos get wide and intonation inexact--it amplifies differences, producing effects that composers in the early days of electronic music spent lots of money with their ring modulators trying to create, but that can startle in sumptuous duets by Schumann.

The singers were nonetheless savvy, and Horne chose not to tempt luck with a Gluck aria on the program, giving the time, instead, to the alert accompanist, Warren Jones, for Chopin’s Polonaise, Opus 26, No. 1. Background suddenly became foreground. His tone all evening was clear as a mountain spring, but now the playing took on a more individual expression, adding a sense of depth and completeness to the entire evening.

It was the kids’ turn Saturday in the first orchestral program of the summer. With less than a week of preparation (convocation had been Monday), British conductor Jeffrey Tate made a program similar to one the Vienna Philharmonic had taken to Orange County earlier in the year--Mozart’s last symphony, the “Jupiter,” and Strauss’ epic, nearly hourlong tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” (Vienna had more cautiously paired an earlier, easier Mozart symphony with the Strauss).

No one expects world-class intonation or ensemble playing under such conditions. But the Mozart, especially, was a real performance--vigorous, full of life, interesting and unusual in its phrasing. The Strauss was not creamy but it was grand and forceful; the concertmaster (ungraciously unidentified in the glossy program) was sound in his solos.

The program began with a delightful flourish--an exceedingly friendly and well-wrought piece for brass, “A Western Fanfare,” by the summer’s composer in residence, Eric Ewazen. But the West is otherwise in name only at the modern academy. There is this summer no acknowledgment in the programs of the illustrious locally based composers who once taught there (Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris and Ernest Bloch), nor is there any music by West Coast composers, past or present. Yet these days a young player not versed in the techniques required to play Adams, Cowell or Harrison is out of touch and probably wouldn’t be touched by an orchestra like the San Francisco Symphony or the Los Angeles Philharmonic.