Friday afternoon, before I left home to go down to Embarcadero Marina Park South to attend the San Diego Symphony’s season-opening Pops Concert, I was reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross’s current account of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Describing that orchestra’s summer outdoor concerts in varying venues across the borough, Ross focused on one in Bedford-Stuyvesant that he described as “an avant garde hip-hop pops concert” that featured guest performers Leslie Uggams and hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def). Although Ross did not proclaim every moment of that concert as thrilling, he clearly approved of the direction…

If last week gave us the summer solstice, then it must be time for San Diego’s summer musical rituals to begin. Monday (June 25) at the Speckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, organist Robert Plimpton and conductor Shannon Kitelinger inaugurated the 25th annual International Summer Organ Festival with a rousing concert of organ, brass, and percussion. In most church settings, the sonic volume of six skilled brass players will easily balance a pipe organ, but the mighty Spreckels Organ—with with 73 ranks of pipes designed to fill the spacious open-air pavilion—overpowered this ensemble much of the time. Kitelinger, who is…