Camerata Pacifica Launches 2024/25 Season with Memorable Ravel and Debussy
/By Truman C. Wang
9/18/2024
Photo Credit: Camerata Pacifica
violinist Paul Huang, cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia
Having attended concerts by the Santa Barbara-based Camerata Pacifica for a good part of a decade, I am reviewing them for the first time. The first concert of their 2024/25 season is an all-French program of Ravel and Debussy. I attended the September 17 concert in San Marino.
French chamber music, like its counterparts in literature, film and art, is an interesting combination of the serious and whimsy. Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello, the first work on the program, was immediately striking for the plush, lustrous tones produced by Paul Huang’s violin and Santiago Cañón-Valencia’s cello. They clearly enjoyed playing together, breathing evocative lines together and engaging in playful banter with their instruments. The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall has only 374 seats; the acoustics is noticeably better upstairs than on the main floor – the piano sounds warmer and less clangy, the strings more airy and less metallic. (Is there a hall in the world where “the higher you sit, the better the sound” does not apply?)
Pianist Gilles Vonsattel played Debussy’s three Images from Book II. A sense of poetry and fantasy permeated his pianistic evocation of delicate bells ("Cloches à travers les feuilles"), moonlight (“la lune descend sur le temple”), and a goldfish (“Poissons d'or”), Fittingly, a beam of light shone over the piano during la lune, on this day of the Chinese Lunar Festival (September 17 in the 2024 Chinese lunar calendar). Vonsattel is an exceptional pianist with a keen sense of Debussy style – its ever-changing color and sonority, the infinite play of light and shade.
Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor, a large-scale, thirty-minute work in four movements, concluded the concert with all three players joining forces in an ebullient dance (first movement), whimsical banter (second), long contemplation (third), and a brilliant virtuosic finale. There was no intermission, just one hour and twenty minutes of musical communion between the audience and musicians onstage.
Adrian Spence, the Camerata Pacifica’s amiable and peripatetic Artistic Director, gave an introductory speech as he always does before the music starts: no photo, no texting, no applause in between movements – that ought to keep away 90% of the audience at the Hollywood Bowl, probably 50% (and growing) at the Disney Hall.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.