Jacaranda Goes Out on Its Own Terms With Exciting Schoenberg Celebration
Feb 25, 2024
Jacaranda, the maverick Santa Monica music series whose home base is a block away from the edge of the North American continent, is no more. Felled in midseason after a bit more than 20 years on the boards.
The reasons are not a surprise — rising union costs, a deficit that couldn’t be tamed. Co-founder/artistic director/prolific program annotator Patrick Scott hinted that “there will be something next” but can’t say what or when. In the meantime, we are left to mourn the loss of one of the more imaginative alternative music series in Southern California, one that was in the middle of celebrating the influence of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) during his 150th birthday year.
Unlike many organizations that pull the plug with no time for goodbyes, Jacaranda gave us fair warning in advance that it would be folding its tent. And rather than slink quietly off the scene, it went out Sunday afternoon and evening (Feb. 25) with a three-part concert “Fierce Beauty,” which hammered together some at-first-glance unlikely juxtapositions of material, forming a sprawling yet somehow coherent and fascinating whole. A dinner break and an intermission separated the segments. All told, the lingering farewell took about six hours to run its course.
There were two brief surprise cameo appearances by two eminent local pianists — Inna Faliks playing up a storm in one of Schoenberg’s Op. 11 piano pieces and Gloria Cheng offering a quiet, introspective selection from Op. 19 — and the charismatic young pianist Andreas Apostolou tore into the Gigue from the Suite for Piano, Op. 25.