Both Sides Now

Jazz returns this Sunday to the cozy confines of the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, a fine place to hear the music without the distractions of a club setting.

Drummer Jake Hanna, a bold and stalwart member of the West Coast jazz scene for years, is the guest and bandleader.

Nearby, the “Under the Stars” concert series at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute comes to a close Sunday with an appearance by tenor Alberto Mizrahi.

Born in Greece, Mizrahi specializes in a range of Jewish music and will appear there with both the John Belizikjian Trio and the Brandeis Bardin Chamber Ensemble.

DETAILS

Jake Hanna at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center, 3050 Los Angeles Ave. in Simi Valley. Tickets are $15 for adults, $12 for seniors 55 and older and $8 for children 12 and under; 581-9940.

Alberto Mizrahi, at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Stuart Raffel Performing Arts Plaza of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute. Tickets are $25; 582-4450.

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GOING SOUTH, GOING NORTH: Last summer, Laura and Eduard Schmieder launched Young Artists International and its component International Laureates Music Festival in Los Angeles. Promising and award-winning young musicians, both on the brink of brilliant careers or already having begun them, were brought to town for study and performances.

The second annual festival is underway in Los Angeles in venues such as UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, the Ford Amphitheatre and the new Zipper Hall downtown, with one “out-of-town” concert in Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater next Thursday. The concert will feature the I Palpiti (Italian for “heartbeat”) Chamber Orchestra, led by Eduard Schmieder and performing music of Purcell, Tartini, Vivaldi and Shostokovich, as well as the late, great film composer Nina Rota’s Concerto for Strings.

DETAILS

I Palpiti Chamber Orchestra at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Lobero Theatre, 33 Canon Perdido St. in Santa Barbara. Tickets are $20; (323) 461-3673.

VIVA LA HANDEL: Opera, it has been said by both its supporters and detractors, is a world removed from the one we know. Even compared with other forms of theater, it’s an escape from the rules of order, where fancifully dressed people stand around singing grandly. The stories are often mythic, the music dignified, the theater irrational.

That was made clear last weekend when opera of a grand sort, if in intimate confines, hit Santa Barbara as it does once a year in the midst of the Music Academy of the West session.

The prevailing reality on the streets was the annual melee of revelry called Fiesta. Bands wailed a block away in clubs and on the big stage in De la Guerra Plaza before a teeming, sweaty and sometimes tipsy throng.

But inside the Lobero Theatre, the refined 3 1/2-hour sprawl of Handel’s rarely performed “Rodelinda” was unfolding onstage. Vocal program head Marilyn Horne, the great veteran of the opera wars, has bumped these opera programs up several notches in the past few years and this production may have been the best yet.

We had a chance to hear vocalists either on their way into the world’s operatic field or already there, similarly accomplished orchestral musicians and other aspects of a fully staged production. All this in a town that now has a small fledgling opera company but is otherwise off the beaten operatic path.

For those of us who were unfamiliar with this wonderful Handel work, unjustly obscure in the States, it all added up to a pleasant revelatory wash of an evening.

The plot is a convoluted one, full of treachery threatening virtue and schemes where love, faked death and power rule.

Rodelinda, sung richly on Saturday by Dina Kuznetsova Toliver, mourns the presumed death of her husband Bertarido, whose throne was stolen by the conniving Grimoaldo (played by Adar Garcia, whose nuanced performance nicely informed this complicated character, mostly villainous but with glimpses of redemption).

On Friday and Sunday the Bertarido role was sung by noted countertenor Bejun Mehta, but on Saturday it was sung by the gifted English contralto Emma Curtis, adding an air of gender ambivalence during the love scenes. Through plot turns both surprising and contrived, stately melancholy and intense resolve come and go in hypnotic waves, courtesy of Handel’s masterly Baroque writing, circa 1725. In the end it’s a musical wonder and a reminder that Baroque opera, the more disciplined ancestor of the reigning Romantic opera scene, is a field deserving greater respect and activity.

Touches of modernity subtly sneaked into this production as with the superb stage set, basically a series of fragments alluding to a regal castle-like setting, or the introduction of a modern handgun and a toy airplane.

The modular architectural components of the set are placed at slightly odd angles to give an expressionist-tinged visual effect, not to mention lending a psychological edge to the proceedings. In certain lighting, the set suddenly took on the desolate character of a De Chirico painting.

As the audience left the Lobero late at night, modern-day Santa Barbara was vibrating with the full force of Fiesta revelry. But that seemed a bit duller, always a sign that something transforming had taken place in the theater’s “inside” world.