MUSIC REVIEWS
La Jolla SummerFest Opens with a Sophisticated Musical Menagerie
This season of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest brings down the curtain on Music Director Cho-Liang Lin’s superb 18-year tenure with the festival. Friday’s opening concert offered sublime chamber works by Bartók and Villa-Lobos, as well as wit and charm in Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.”
Read MoreOpera NEO’s ‘Merry Widow’ Waltzes into Town with Style
Opera NEO launched its summer season with a flashy, kinetic, cleverly updated production of that warhorse of operettas, Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. Forget about Paris of 1905–the widow returns to Las Vegas of today.
Read MoreSan Diego’s Midsummer Choral Magic
Two recent impressive performances of choral music: Ruben Valenzuela’s Willan West project offered some fine examples of Healey Willan’s liturgical choral music in Hillcrest’s All Saints’ Episcopal Church, and Patrick Walders’ Summer Conducting Workshop offered a program of primarily secular choral music in the workshop’s final recital at St. Andrew’s by the Sea Episcopal Church in Pacific Beach.
Read MoreOpera NEO’s Generous All You Can Hear Opera Buffet in Encinitas
As a tantalizing preview to Opera NEO’s upcoming festival of three staged operas, Friday’s Cabaret concert at the Encinitas Library Concert Hall promises a season of highly charged drama and polished lead singers. This annual program offered a sparkling variety of ensembles and duets from opera, operetta, and musical theater performed by the members of the 2018 festival.
Read MoreMainly Mozart 2018 Concludes with Majestic Mendelssohn and Heroic Haydn
Mainly Mozart’s final concert of the 2018 season featured the Festival Orchestra under the baton of Music Director Michael Francis in a program of Mozart, Haydn, and Mendelssohn.
Read MoreCellist Johannes Moser Thrills with Tchaikovsky “Variations on a Rococo Theme” at Mainly Mozart
If the most rewarding moments of a Mainly Mozart Festival concert can occur during the performance of music by other composers, Saturday’s (June 16) Mainly Mozart program made a great case for that possibility with Johannes Moser’s brilliant solo in Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme,” Op. 33, and Stravinsky’s sparkling “Dumbarton Oaks” Concerto.
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