What ensemble founder Adrian Spence calls “high-definition chamber music” is on the playlist as Camerata Pacifica brings their Fall program to the San Gabriel Valley on Tuesday, September 17th at The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens.
The season’s launch also includes engagements in Thousand Oaks, Downtown Los Angeles, and Santa Barbara.
The program will feature three virtuosic artists performing works by Ravel and Debussy: Paul Huang, violin, Santiago Cañon-Valencia, cello, and Gilles Vonsattel, piano. Camerata Pacifica Artistic Director Adrian Spence remarks that he chose the all-French program for the season opener because, “France has been a center of music and culture for centuries.” But little else about the ensemble or the program aligns with the past.
A Leap of Faith
We just caught up with Spence by phone as he drove to his home in Santa Barbara after completing a formation skydive jump of 114 skydivers in Wisconsin. This group jump brings Spence closer to his target of 2,500 jumps which he claims are no longer an adrenalin-rush, but rather a place of mental sanctuary.
Of skydiving, he says, “It’s the most liberating feeling you can imagine. There is no elevator lurch. It’s very fluid, and there’s never a sense of descent.”
Spence, a native of County Down, Northern Ireland who originally launched his company under the name as the Bach Camerata in 1990 when he was just 25 years old, is full of surprises. During COVID, using his iPad, he began recording more than 150 videos — thus the “high definition” label — that originally aired every Sunday on his YouTube channel, a process that Spence says “emerged spontaneously.”
Since then, Spence has teamed with UCLA Health to create The Nightingale Channel, curated programming delivered to patient bedsides. Offering live Camerata Pacifica recordings of musical pieces chosen for their uplifting and soothing qualities as well as panel discussions, The Nightingale Channel is now being shared with hospitals across the country.
And it’s not just the expected heritage works, as in the durable Herr Mozart and the ol’ Ludvig van. Spence also commissions new works from contemporary composers, often with a particular soloist in mind. Among these is The Consolation of Rain, composed by David Bruce and featuring UK conductor Nicholas Daniel, a friend of Spence’s, on oboe, supported by sighing cello, sparkling harp and shimmering marimba accompaniment.
This moving piece was inspired by the poem “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Mary Elizabeth Frye, and the chromatic effects – rippling, glistening droplets of sound shaken by the rumbling of far-off thunder – may remind listeners of Debussy. Fragile, trembling spaces between the notes poignantly capture the experience of loss from which there is no returning. The oboe seems especially suited to the subject and the channel with its penetrating and bright sound, and Spence has commented in prior interviews that he’s interested in elevating the status of the oboe as a solo instrument.
The classics, he says, weren’t staid or stiff when audiences first heard them. “Remember,” he says, “that in the 18th century, there really was no such thing as public concert-going. Hearing orchestral music was a privilege available only to the elites, in very exclusive private spaces. A bit later, society began to change, and the opera house or concert hall became the crown jewel of every European city and town. Concert-going is a comparatively new thing. Prior to about 1900, if you had not been to war, an orchestra would be the biggest, loudest sound you’d ever heard.”
Heartfelt programming
This sense of discovery is at the heart of Camerata Pacifica’s programming today. “We’re not trying to maintain the prestige of chamber music, all the airs and graces, the furs and pearls and all of that (expletive),” says Spence. As for the classics, he says, “The reassurance of only hearing familiar pieces is not what live music should be. If that’s all you want, you may as well just stay home and listen to your favorite CD.”
His programming is packed with sonic surprises in presentation as well as in the curation of the playlist. He adds that he’s just commissioned David Bruce to compose a new piece for a woodwind quintet scheduled to debut in 2026. Other contemporary composers adding to Camerata Pacifica’s repertoire include John Harbison, Jake Heggie, Huang Ruo, Lera Auerbach, Bright Sheng, Ian Wilson, Libby Larsen, John Luther Adams and Clarice Assad.
Spence says that the metrics show that the post-COVID concert-goers skew younger than in the past three decades, but “…I’ve never been concerned with the whole ‘graying of the audience’ thing. There are new old people coming up every day. It gets back to how we conceive our mission. Other organizations expend a lot of energy trying to develop youth programs around the standards and giving out free champagne, anything to make the experience seem more enticing and more relevant. My point there is just to make the show damn interesting. We add elements to amplify the experience. It has to be challenging to the inquisitive intellect, like striking a match in the listener’s curiosity. Everyone in Camerata Pacific is rabidly devoted to music. Thirty-five years later, that has not changed. We never compromise.”
A Twist of Fate
Spence’s musical journey began when his mother, who taught elementary school, brought a piano into the Spence home. “We lived just outside Belfast, and we are a very working-class family. But having a piano was aspirational, a social grace.” Spence began piano lessons at age seven, and he says, “The minute I sat down at that keyboard, I knew ‘This is it!’”
He later moved to the flute, which he says he took to “…like a duck to water,” leading him to study at the London College of Music, University of West London. He’s even played the flute while skydiving but says, “I fired myself from performing about five years ago because I surround myself with virtuoso musicians, and now I just can’t keep up.”
Lauded English flautist Geoffrey Gilbert took notice of the young Spence, and invited him to continue his studies in America, an invitation which Spence describes as “life-changing.” He arrived in America in 1986, first stop, Springsteen country, Asbury Park, NJ.
“I drank the Kool-Aid, and I thought the streets were paved with gold. I lived just down the road from the Stone Pony, but the East Coast was too European for me.”
Westward ho, and so Spence moved to Santa Barbara in 1989, where he hatched his scheme to form the musical ensemble. He says, “I so believed in America that it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t happen. I will say that this would never have happened in New York. I was so naif. You may call it ignorance on my part because that’s what it was, but also the fact that I don’t ever take no for an answer.”
DEETS
- Camerata Pacifica Presents Three Virtuosic Artists on Works by Ravel and Debussy
- Program:
- RAVEL, Sonata for Violin and Cello
- DEBUSSY, Images, Book II
- RAVEL, Piano Trio in A-minor
- Tuesday, September 17, 7:30 PM
- The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall
- 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108
- To purchase tickets: www.cameratapacifica.org, 805-884-8410
