REVIEWS
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from the SANTA BARBARA INDEPENDENT
[DEC 14,2000]
- World
We Have Lost
Santa Barbara City College
Holiday Choral Concert.
SBCC Chamber Singers, the SBCC Concert Choir,
soloists, and instrumental ensembles, directed by Nathan Kreitzer,
at First United Methodist Church, Saturday, December 9
- I somewhat misrepresented this concert in my
column last week. I got the featured work right, but my guess as to
the rest of the program-based on the words "other holiday favorites"
in a flyer proved to be exceptionally wide of the mark. Instead of the
carols and Christmas pop songs of my imagining (did I suppose I would
hear Nathan Kreitzer directing "The Little Drummer Boy"?), the first
half of the concert proved to be an exciting musical adventure that
took us from Elizabethan/Jacobean England to the present dayroughly,
from 1598 to 1998-and, after the break, the sublime Fauré.
- The evening began with the a cappella SBCC
Chamber Singers, Kreitzer directing, performing motets by John Bennet
and John Wilbye. Bennet, who is dated only by the publication of his
works (about 1599-1614), was represented by "Weep, 0 Mine Eyes," the
most popular of the 17 motets he wrote for The Triumphs of Oriana.
Wilbye's life, on the other hand, is extraordinarily well-documented,
because he spent a large part of it in the service of the Cornwallis
family, who seem to have been almost Teutonic about their record-keeping.
The group sang his "Adieu, Sweet Amaryllis" from 1598. The Chamber Singers
continued with four selections from Mozart's Vespere Solennes de
Confessore, and finished up with three modern works, of which "Come
to Me, My Love" by Norman Dello Joio was by far the most beautiful and
striking. The Concert Choir came on then, and brought us up to intermission
with an eerie, hypnotic, haunting Missa Brevis, composed just
a couple of years ago by Kristina Vasiliauskaite. Only
then did we get the Fauré,
and it was still wonderful. The Pie Jesu is always a highlight for me,
and Gina Bellino's voice, clear and pure, was equal to the challenge.
There was more drama than Iremembered, more turbulence.
- It was a marvelous concert
from start to finish.
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