Photo of Festival Artistic Director Inon Barnatan by Marco Borggreve
SummerFest - La Jolla Music Society
SummerFest opens this week – The La Jolla Music Society’s opening performance is sold out, but Saturday’s “Danse Macabre” includes all sorts of chamber works, with an obsessive solo violin sonata by Eugene Ysaÿe, the Saint-Saëns work that gives the concert its name (with violinist Augustin Hadelich and the Artistic Director of the festival, pianist Inon Barnatan), a two-piano version of Ravel’s La Valse, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, as well as contemporary pieces by Martin Butler (for piano and wind quintet) and Thomas Adès (for clarinet, violin, cello and piano). On Sunday afternoon at 3, also at the Baker-Baum Concert Hall, there’s “Passions and Storms,” with works by Janáček, Thomas Adès, and Beethoven, featuring Adès (who’s the season’s Composer-in-Residence) as well as violinists Augustin Hadelich and Tessa Lark. SummerFest runs through the 24th of August.
Festival Mozaic
Festival Mozaic runs its summer festival through the 27th of July in San Luis Obispo, with Midday mini-concerts Tuesday through Friday at noon (in various locations), featuring cellist Robert deMaine and Artist-in-Residence John Novacek, bassoonist Fei Xie, cellist Alexander Hersh, and pianist Susan Grace. There’s also the “Chamber Concert 2” at the Templeton Performing Arts Center on Tuesday afternoon with music by Beethoven, Louise Farrenc, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Felix Mendelssohn; and an evening concert at 7:30 on Wednesday, “Mozart in the Mission” at the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa (in addition to Mozart, there are also works by Gabrieli, Glinka, and Ravel). Friday at 7:30 is the final Chamber Concert at the Miossi Cultural and Performing Arts Center, and the Festival Mozaic Orchestra wraps things up on Saturday at 7:30 at the PACSLO with Scott Yoo leading them in works by Mozart, Wagner, and ending with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
FREE: Westside Chamber Orchestra
The Westside Chamber Orchestra presents “Genre Generics: Music from Middle Europe” – a program with music by Béla Bartók, Anton Webern, and Joseph Haydn this Saturday evening. Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 will serve as the finale, with Webern’s Concerto for 9 Instruments, and Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings. “The Westside Chamber Orchestra presents three profoundly influential Middle European composers covering the birth of classicism to the rise of modernism.” The concert will be led by conductor Brian Stone at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Santa Monica at 7pm Saturday. There’s a suggested donation of $25.
