SummerFest’s Sublime Spiritual Journey

Saturday’s La Jolla SummerFest program, “Songs of Heaven and Earth,” clustered major sacred works by J.S. Bach, Olivier Messaien and Gustav Mahler, a combination of composers I cannot recall appearing together on a previous SummerFest program, Both the musical progression and the spiritual journey proved unusually compelling.

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SummerFest Boldly Mixes George Crumb and Maurice Ravel with Rachmaninoff on Sunday’s Program

Sunday afternoon, SummerFest Music Director Inon Barnatan matched Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s virtuoso, arch-Romantic Sonata in G Minor for Piano and Cello, Op. 19, with George Crumb’s rarely performed 1971 “Vox Balaenae” (“Voice of the Whale”) for amplified flute, cello and piano, and Maurice Ravel’s “Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé.”

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2018: A Year of Winning Musical Collaborations Across the City

In 2018, the key players of San Diego’s classical music scene struck gold by collaborating with each other. Enlisting some 10 musical organizations in its month-long “It’s About Time Time” festival in January, the San Diego Symphony set a high bar of cooperation for the coming year, but other organizations readily took up the challenge with rewarding results.

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