UCSB Festival Focuses on Britain

For year No. 6, the enterprising UCSB New Music Festival lent an ear to the UK, that motherland often deserving wider recognition in classical circles. Visitors included celebrated soprano Jane Manning, the sharp chamber ensemble Jane’s Minstrels, and composers Anthony Payne and Judith Weir, who exerted a smart and sometimes whimsical presence in the festival, comprising five concerts in Santa Barbara and a finale tonight at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Add to that an ancillary appearance by the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields on Thursday at the Arlington Theater, and the festival’s cheeky claim that “the British are coming!” seemed valid. In all, a valiant attempt was made to tap the pulse of Britain, chamber new music division.

On the first two official evening concerts, the ever-assured Manning veered from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. Friday at the University’s Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall, she appeared in a gaudy flapper outfit, singing the giddy, fox-trotting finale of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Fantasia and Two Pavanes (after Henry Purcell), and breathlessly reciting the enlightened nonsense of Edith Sitwell’s poems, over William Walton’s “Facade.”

Saturday at the Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Santa Barbara, Manning held forth strongly on the more angst-tinged stuff of Thea Musgrave’s “Primavera” and Harrison Birtwhistle’s volatile “Ring a Dumb Carillon.” Payne’s music--via the fascinating “A Day in the Life of a Mayfly” and “Sea Change”--proved especially compelling, evoking both the forces of nature and modern musical culture (stoking the argument that the contemporary composers, with their array of options, may be better equipped to depict the abstraction of nature than earlier, strictly tonal composers). By stitching together various vocabularies, Payne gives romanticism a new name and face.

Another intriguing, original composer, Judith Weir, was represented by only one piece on the first two evenings. “Several Concertos” is a compact, modular wonder, expertly drawn by flutist Lisa-Maree Amos, cellist Dov Goldberg and pianist Dominic Saunders.

Other festival features: the UCSB Chamber Choir performed John Tavener’s new-old liturgical music; and a student ensemble braved the Stravinsky-esque Octet by the late Peter Racine Fricker, a noted British composer based at UC Santa Barbara for a quarter century.

This festival, founded by William Kraft and co-run by Jeremy Haladyna, remains a fine role model of how to nurture the precious, imperiled resource of new music. The British came, and fairly well conquered.