Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

In this Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph, Ruth Barati is surrounded by photographs of her family.

Town accepts sculpture honoring Baratis

By Jeff Kearns

When Maestro George Barati died two years ago after a fall in downtown Los Gatos, many were saddened to hear the news, including Elaine Bainbridge.

Bainbridge, who was enrolled in one the music appreciation classes Barati was teaching through the recreation department when he died, quickly went to work on a project to honor the composer.

Bainbridge approached Carmel sculptor Paul Wilson, who agreed to create a redwood sculpture honoring Barati and his wife, Ruth, who taught yoga at the recreation department. To finance the project, she raised more than $1,600 from friends and students of the couple. "I wanted to do something to remember him," Bainbridge says. "He was such a remarkable man."

Bainbridge, who also took yoga classes with Ruth Barati, started by sending out fliers to students and friends of the couple, and sold tapes of the composer's lectures. In September 1996, she took the idea to the town Arts Commission, which she says was very supportive of the idea. A year later, the commission passed the sculpture on to the Art Selection Panel, which recommended that the town accept the donation. The Town Council formally accepted the gift last week.

"The sculpture symbolizes the grace and beauty of both their lives, his in music and hers in yoga, and both of them in philosophy," Bainbridge says. She rejected the initial idea proposed by the recreation department--a bench. "I wanted something that better symbolized their contributions," she says.

Although Wilson is finished with the polished sculpture, which is made from virgin redwood root and stands more than six feet tall, it's still in his Carmel studio awaiting a ride up to Los Gatos. The untitled sculpture will sit on a pedestal on the Civic Center lawn, in front of the library. A dedication ceremony will be held sometime in late July or early August.

Now that the town has accepted the sculpture, Bainbridge's son Dan, a local contractor, has agreed to donate the labor and materials needed to pour a concrete base for the sculpture. His company will also build a concrete support for a plaque.

The value of the sculpture is listed as $3,500, but Wilson only asked for a fraction of the cost.

George Barati's death, two years ago this week, came after the composer spent 11 days in a coma after sustaining serious head injuries after an apparent fall from a curb on E. Main Street. He was 83.

In addition to a long career as a composer, Barati conducted symphonies in cities around the world, including London, Vienna, Tokyo and Seoul. He served as the music director of the Honolulu Symphony from 1950 to 1968, and the Santa Cruz Symphony from 1971 to 1980. He also conducted the Montalvo Chamber Orchestra in Saratoga throughout most of the '70s.

Ruth Barati, 81, became interested in yoga more than 40 years ago in Hawaii and spent 25 years teaching classes in Los Gatos.

Wilson, too, has spent more than 40 years working on his trade. He also has a career in internal medicine. Working out of the same studio for 24 years, he sculpts mostly with wood and stone he collects in the canyons around Big Sur and the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Ruth Barati said she knows her husband would have been very touched. "The sculpture seems so appropriate because it represents both him in music and me in yoga, in the way the form of the sculpture has a sense of flow and rhythm, the rhythm of movement that one wants in yoga, and the flow of rhythm found in music," she said.

[ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ]