Montage: UCSB Music Department Showcase Concert

The UCSB Department of Music will present “Montage,” a department showcase, on Sunday, November 12, 2017 at 7:30 p.m. at the beautiful Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Santa Barbara. The unique production will highlight classical, jazz, world, and contemporary music, with performances showcasing both students and faculty. The program will feature many of the department’s newest faculty members, including Isabel Bayrakdarian (soprano), Gabrielle Castriotta (oboe), Jonathan Moerschel (viola), Jennifer Kloetzel (cello), Bahram Osqueezadeh (santoor), and Grey Brothers conducting the UCSB Chamber Choir, as well as Robert Koenig (piano), Scott Marcus (nay), Sue Rudnicki (tabla), and Jill Felber conducting the UCSB Flute Choir. Admission is free!

Continuing with Professor Jill Felber’s original vision, Montage 2017 will include 12 different acts and over 60 musicians, featuring nearly all performance areas of the department in just under 75 minutes, with back-to-back performances and no intermission. This year’s production will take place downtown to offer easier access to the Santa Barbara community, while the new location will afford exciting new staging opportunities for the ambitious program.

The evening will open with the UCSB Chamber Choir performing Morten Lauridsen’s mesmerizing O Magnum Mysterium, led by Grey Brothers. The UCSB Flute Choir will follow with the 2017 National Flute Association’s Flute Choir Composition Award-winner, Nicole Chamberlain’s Chivy, a piece filled with creative use of extended techniques like beat boxing and jet whistles. One of the department’s newest faculty members, Gabrielle Castriotta, will perform the first and fourth movements from Benjamin Britten’s work for solo oboe, Six Metamorphoses after Ovid (Op. 49), with each movement representing a character from Roman mythology – in this case, Pan and Bacchus. Grammy Award-winning soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian and Grammy Award-nominated pianist Robert Koenig will present Maurice Ravel’s haunting Kaddisch, based on a hymn of praises to God found in Jewish prayer services.

Two traditional solos will follow, the first being an Indian tabla drum solo by Shashank Aswath, a graduate student in the UCSB Media Arts & Technology program and a member of the UCSB Middle East Ensemble, and the second being a Middle Eastern santoor, or hammered dulcimer, solo performed by the department’s Lecturer in Persian Music, Bahram Osqueezadeh. UCSB graduate pianist Petra Peršolja will present Franz Liszt’s captivating “Tarantella” from his Venezia e Napoli, followed by a performance of Frédéric Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28, No. 15 (“Raindrop”) for cello quartet, featuring cellist and faculty member Jennifer Kloetzel.

Rounding out the program, Reno Behnken (piano) and Milo Bechtloff (sax) – students from UCSB faculty member Jon Nathan’s Jazz Combos class – will perform Horace Silver’s “Summer in Central Park.” The Chair of the Department of Music, Scott Marcus, will lead a quartet of performers in a traditional Arab piece, in which he will be featured on the Middle Eastern reed flute, the nay, and Lecturer Sue Rudnicki will be featured on the tabla drum. The program will close with a performance of the exhilarating fourth movement of Johannes Brahms’ Trio in A minor, Op.114 by two of the department’s newest additions to the Strings Program faculty, Jonathan Moerschel (viola) and Jennifer Kloetzel (cello), who will be joined by UCSB Professor of Piano, Robert Koenig.

Trinity Episcopal Church is located at 1500 State St., Santa Barbara, CA 93101. For more information, please visit trinitysb.ladiocese.org.