Matthew Aucoin and the San Diego Symphony Lift Up Music’s Future in Both Past and Present Modes

As the San Diego Symphony’s ambitious, engaging festival “Hearing the Future” takes its victory lap, Festival Curator Matthew Aucoin led the orchestra in an exuberant concert in Copley Symphony Hall Friday, January 25. His refreshing approach to program design completely ignored the traditional overture-concerto-symphony formula: each half of the concert offered seven shorter works or…

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Hausmann Quartet Explores the Galaxy with David Ludwig, Beethoven and Haydn

If you are puzzled to learn that the Hausmann Quartet’s November 11 Sunday program at the Maritime Museum of San Diego was planned around the outer space probes of Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, you probably lack the imagination of the four clever Hausmann musicians. But you will discover the relationship of the three composers mentioned in the headline when you read the review.

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Michael Francis and Anne-Marie McDermott Inspire Exotic Fare in Opening Mainly Mozart Festival Concert

Michael Francis opened the 30th installment of San Diego’s annual Mainly Mozart Festival Saturday, June 9, with an ebullient orchestra concert that started with with Jean-Féry Rebel’s harmonically startling, rarely performed Baroque dance suite “Les Élémens,” jumped to Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 415, featuring soloist Anne-Marie McDermott—that composer’s equally assertive attack on late 18th-century Viennese rococo elegance—and closed with Beethoven’s Second Symphony.

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