In good traffic you can reach Santa Barbara in less than two hours. Its Mediterranean atmosphere, excellent wineries in its environs, and mild water beaches are reasons plenty to cruise up the 101, but classical music may not be what first comes to your mind. It should, though, because it is a city which has long cultivated a lively classical music scene, with many distinguished institutions and ensembles calling the area affectionately known as the “American Riviera” its home, not least of them being the Santa Barbara Symphony. I have not heard them in a long time, not since taking the former Amtrak San Diegan in January 2000 to hear a four-day festival devoted to the still neglected Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, which was conducted by the orchestra’s former music director Gisèle Ben-Dor. At the time the Santa Barbara Symphony was a cracking, gutsy ensemble with a touch of warmth around the edges of its attacks. Their most recent concert, streamed live this past weekend, demonstrated that current music director Nir Kabaretti has not only preserved these qualities, but also enriched the mellow blend of its corporate sonority.

Given the contemporary diminishing of this country’s collectively assembled mythos, resulting in our once marmoreal heroes being looked upon as worth little more than the avian excreta accumulated upon their now oft-tumbled monuments, last weekend’s Americana program was a little surprising, even quaint. As it happens, the grand figures of American classical music have not been spared the present’s restless inquisition of the past.

Aaron Copland struggled his whole life long to remain on the right side of ever-fluctuating history. A dedicated supporter of communism and the workers’ movement in the 1930s – 1940s, he quickly dropped out of leftist organizations after being called upon to testify by HUAC in 1953; openly gay, he nevertheless remained discrete about his personal life in public statements, even well after the Stonewall riots. Facing each other across the epochal divide of 1945 were Fanfare for the Common Man and the Old American Songs which opened the Santa Barbara Symphony’s concert: The former a full-throated assertion of his earlier commitment to “socialist realism,” the latter a seemingly apolitical retreat into nationalist nostalgia meant to quell postwar paranoia. Fanfare is one of those fortunate musical works which are virtually invincible to bad performances. Santa Monica’s was very fine, with neatly balanced brass and percussion imparting nobility as well as power.

Trickier are the Old American Songs which in the wrong hands can sound cute and saccharine. Baritone Cedric Berry, however, possesses amply the savvy and vocal charisma required to convince in this score. In the lead-up to the concert, a Chicago Tribune review praising his voice “of considerable power and agility” was much trumpeted by the Santa Barbara Symphony’s marketing team. But his art is considerably deeper than what that blurb implied. Berry’s rendering of Copland’s Old American Songs—artless and direct, beguiling the ear into believing this music is an authentic expression of the soil rather than the urbane facsimile it really is—was a masterclass in miniature. Listen closer and one hears more: The natural plasticity of his voice, its evenness, the evocativeness of his word-painting, and the sureness of his interpretive instincts.

He followed the Copland with “Polarity” by George N. Gianopoulos, extracted from his song cycle America, Op. 43. “He took a Harlem Renaissance poet and set it to music,” Berry remarked about the song prior to its performance. “The music captured some of the swag from that era. He does it in just such a smooth, cool way.” The performance was as smooth and cool as the song itself. In his setting Gianopoulos drew out the music inherent in McKay’s verse, rather than impose music upon it. With its long melodic lines and shimmering orchestration the song was a haunting “Gotham Nocturne”; the glint of a silvery trumpet reflecting off the moonlight evoking the glamor, as well as the decadence and disillusionment that rapidly subsumed Roaring ‘20s America.

The hope which also surged during that period, then lost amidst the Great Depression and subsequent mass annihilations hitherto unprecedented in human history, until resurging briefly before the onset of the Cold War was apparent in the Lyric for Strings by George Walker. “Hope” may seem an odd quality to ascribe to this music: It was written in memory of the composer’s grandmother. Yet the mood throughout is restrained, speaking of dignified grief rather than emotive lashing out. Perhaps it was a tribute to as much as reflection of a woman who had endured slavery in the flesh but managed to live long enough to see the emergence of a better world in which her grandson could eventually triumph.

The relaxed lyricism of Samuel Barber’s Summer Music and Robin Frost’s Serenade eventually gave way to Charles Ives’ The Unanswered Question, which (unintentionally or not) was answered in ironic fashion by the Fanfare for an Uncommon Woman, No. 1 by Joan Tower. Its tone and title also turned Copland’s utopian collective vision on its head; the “Me” vanquishing the “We.”

Maybe the better answer was Ives’ unanswered one. As the Santa Barbara strings coolly phrased the impassive yet obsessive chant of the “Druids who know, see, and hear nothing,” the call and response between the solo trumpet (played straight and without affect by Dustin McKinney) and wind quartet interrupted combatively until finally exhausting themselves in futile effort. Yesterday’s progress become the failures to be mended of the present, which in turn sow the seeds of unforeseen failures of a future yet to come. In Ives as in history, multipolar despite (and in spite of) us, eternity which knows, sees, and hears nothing always has the last say.

Five hundred years ago, artists and thinkers of the Renaissance revived and examined the works of the distant Greco-Roman past with a respect that bespoke not only of their sensitivity to its beauty and wealth of feeling, but also of their gratitude that these things had somehow managed to survive centuries of neglect and intellectual ruin. Naturally, we in 2019 know better than all that now. Because if the inexplicable and seemingly unstoppable triumph of regieoper—illustrated hereabouts last Saturday by the revival of Barrie Kosky’s and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute for Los Angeles Opera—has taught us anything, it’s that the accumulation of toils, struggles, labors, joys, and sorrows that comprise our past exists today only for us enlightened moderns to laugh and sneer at.

Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel—like a lot of products of the German late 18th century; those twilight hours of the Enlightenment, before the night of Napoleon and Metternich cast the whole of it in darkness—is simultaneously silly and profound: A dashing prince and a girl-crazy guy in a bird suit are commanded by the king of some vaguely Egyptian land to submit themselves to a host of trials in order to gain the wisdom to love. Thus from these unlikely roots does one of Mozart’s most human creations spring forth. But instead of allowing this Rasselas-meets-Soupy Sales spectacle to stand on its own strange feet, Kosky and Andrade straightjacketed it into an ill-fitting vision of confused F. W. Murnau and Tim Burton tropes which latched parasitically off the score, feeding off of it zombie-like.

Masking their evident embarrassment and chagrin at the sincerity, loveliness, and even weirdness of Mozart and Schikaneder’s original vision, Kosky’s and Andrade’s hypercapitalist irony also drew with sheepish self-consciousness a veil over the comparative emptiness of their own. Los Angeles Opera’s previous production by Gerald Scarfe, a vivid technicolor riot which rendered The Magic Flute into an enchanting, living children’s storybook was sorely missed.

The musical performance itself was better, if not without its own significant problems.

Music Director James Conlon lead a performance of admirable moderation and proportion, even if the score’s earthy bounciness came off a little flat-footed at times. Bogdan Volkov, as the sweet-toned and expressive Tamino, and Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, the imposing and fatherly Sarastro whose voice radiated like a column of pure light that cut through the production’s ironic fog were by far the best of a mixed singing cast. Zuzana Marková’s Pamina was good, if a tad matronly and wooly; while the unidiomatic grit in Theo Hoffman’s Papageno was more suggestive of Baron Scarpia than bumbling bird-wrangler. Miscast altogether as Queen of the Night was So Young Park, whose vocal resources were audibly strained to its limits by her challenging role. Unable to cope with the crystalline etching of Mozart’s coloratura writing, she settled for blurring through it, and only managed to punctuate its top Fs by sheer dint of screaming.

In her prefatory notes for the production, Andrade tellingly described the device she contrived to replace the score’s dialogues—silent film-style intertitles accompanied by stylistically anachronistic music by Mozart, along with an inexplicable bit of the infamous “Oriental riff” for another dash of (bad) taste—as a “gimmick.” The Cambridge English Dictionary defines the word as: “Something invented especially for the purpose of attracting attention and that has no other purpose or value.” I couldn’t have described this production of The Magic Flute better myself.