LA JOLLA — The 21 musicians ambling onto La Jolla’s Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center’s stage for Mainly Mozart’s first 2025 concert on June 18 personified the allure of the festival’s “all-star orchestra” concept: concertmasters or principals (for the most part) from orchestras as august as the Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and National, San Francisco, and Detroit Symphonies.
In the season’s five remaining concerts (ending June 28), Mainly Mozart will feature as soloists the Berlin Philharmonic’s concertmaster, Noah Bendix-Balgley; the LA Phil’s principal clarinet and bassoon, Boris Allakhverdyan and Whitney Crockett, respectively; and pianist Joyce Yang, Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient and silver medalist of the 2005 Van Cliburn Competition. Holding the “keys to the world’s best car,” as he put it, is the festival’s second-ever music director, Michael Francis, a former double bassist with the London Symphony and now music director of the Florida Orchestra.
Mainly Mozart was founded in 1988 by British conductor David Atherton, then the just-departed music director of San Diego Symphony, and Nancy Laturno, the orchestra’s former director of marketing, who were inspired by New York’s 22-year-old Mostly Mozart Festival. That festival performed in air-conditioned Lincoln Center, featured a month-long season, and used New York freelancers contracted seasonally. In contrast, Mainly initially performed in San Diego’s outdoor Old Globe Theater (no A/C needed) and then Balboa Theater, presented concerts over two weeks, and early on began earning its “largest annual gathering of concertmasters in North America” tagline by inviting principal players and concertmasters from the best regional and national orchestras.
Though Mostly Mozart was absorbed by Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City festival in 2023, Mainly Mozart has stubbornly survived under Laturno, now CEO and strategic-cum-artistic director. As Covid threatened an arts Armageddon, the festival launched “Mainly Mozart at the Drive‑In”: masked, socially distanced musicians from across the country performing live through FM broadcast and rolled-down windows to an audience inside their cars (horn-honking replaced applause). Remarkably, under the Damoclean sword of Covid, Mainly Mozart doubled its pre-Covid indoor attendance, turned a profit, and then kept growing. “Ticket sales hit record highs in 2023,” Laturno told me, “and are projected to exceed last year’s ticket-income numbers, making it our second-highest year for ticket income.”
Though Mainly Mozart’s programming is generally conservative (Vivaldi, Beethoven, Bach, Mendelssohn, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, and eight Mozart pieces), flashes of freshness this year include Bendix-Balgley’s Klezmer Concerto, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Richard Strauss’ Duet Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon, and — the highlight of this year’s opening night — Astor Piazzolla’s Las Cuatro Estaciones Porteñas (Four Seasons of Buenos Aires).
It may be virtually impossible to surprise when programming Mozart, but the festival got lucky in September 2024, when a previously unknown 13-minute, seven-movement string trio by a barely pubescent Mozart was discovered in Leipzig’s music library. Spiritedly played as if familiar repertoire by David Kim (concertmaster, Philadelphia Orchestra), Nurit Bar-Josef (concertmaster, National Symphony), and Scott Pingel (principal double bass, San Francisco Symphony), this so-called Ganz kleine Nachtmusik (Quite a Little Night Music) will disappoint those seeking signs of early Mozartian genius.
Francis’ decision to assign the score’s basso part to Pingel’s bowed double bass rather than a cello injected a raw rhythmic drive and throbbing foundation that spotlighted Kim’s soaring lyricism. But at times (the third-movement Menuet, for example), one wondered if a cello would have provided a more blended sense of harmony. Ganz kleine is a pleasant, effective piece (especially for a 12-year-old), but listeners expecting revelations had to wait for intermission’s end.
In a stroke of inspiration, Mainly Mozart programmed its second half around violinist Gidon Kremer’s suggestion to interweave Vivaldi’s extremely familiar The Four Seasons with Ukraine-born composer Leonid Desyatnikov’s string orchestra arrangement of Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. The incarnation of cross-genre synergy, Piazzolla’s first musical love was tango, but he fell just as hard for classical music and jazz, encountered in his New York years (ages 4 to 15). When offered a spot with a popular Argentine tango orchestra at 18, he thanked them by playing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Piazzolla’s biographer notes. “Leave that stuff for the Americans,” they responded.
Piazzolla’s four Estaciones, written separately between 1965 and 1969 for a classical-tango fusion quintet of violin, piano, electric guitar, double bass, and bandoneon, display all of Piazzolla’s influences. Though he played them together only occasionally, in the late 1990s Desyatnikov reworked them to not only cohere as a string orchestra suite but also to underline their relationship to Vivaldi’s work.
To mirror Vivaldi’s concerto structure, he divided each of Piazzolla’s four seasons into three sections and inserted occasional quotations from Vivaldi’s Seasons.
Kremer, who commissioned Desyatnikov’s work, then suggested the sequencing followed by Mainly Mozart on June 18: Vivaldi’s “Spring” followed by Piazzolla’s “Summer,” then Vivaldi’s “Summer,” and so on — alternating each composer’s season until Vivaldi’s “Winter” is followed by the eighth and final season, Piazzolla’s “Spring.” (To acknowledge the two composers’ inverted seasons, Desyatnikov inserted his Vivaldi quotes in the appropriate Argentinean season — e.g., Vivaldi’s “Winter” quoted in Piazzolla’s “Summer.”)
Sound complicated? It worked like a charm. This listener expected Piazzolla’s Latin extroversion to overwhelm Vivaldi’s Baroque temperament. But the interleaving of Vivaldi’s vivid program music (birds, thunderstorms dogs, rain, etc.) and Piazzolla’s suave, passionate innovation — string effects from col legno and scratch tones to slashing tremolo and Bartók pizzicato — allowed the former to avoid all staleness and the latter to steer clear of sugar-high crashes. They’re made for each other.
This synergy was magnified by having seven different “all-stars” perform each of the eight pieces. According to Francis, the seven soloists decided among themselves beforehand who would perform each “season.” David Kim, Mainly Mozart’s concertmaster, delivered the first and last movements, Vivaldi’s “Spring” and Piazzolla’s “Spring,” respectively. The elegance and clarity Kim brought to Vivaldi’s “Spring” gave way to Jun Iwasaki’s (Kansas City Symphony) virtuosic vigor and flair in Piazzolla’s “Summer.” Unconstrained by dynamic markings or expressive articulations (absent from Vivaldi’s score), Jeff Multer (Florida Orchestra) injected an energized frankness into Vivaldi’s “Summer.” Bar-Josef deftly answered with the lyricism and precise virtuosity that should brought to Piazzolla’s “Autumn.”
Like Bar-Josef, the Boston Symphony’s Alexander Velinzon is about clean, calm professionalism. This enabled him to avoid the hammy overplaying in Vivaldi’s “Autumn,” that the composer’s programmatic references to Bacchus’ liquor, wild beasts, guns, and dogs seem to invite. Where Nathan Olson (Dallas Symphony) brought out the elegance and sophistication in Piazzolla’s “Winter,” Zachary DePue (Naples Philharmonic) melted some of the ice in Vivaldi’s “Winter” with his big, warm sound and personable playing. In Piazzolla’s closing “Spring,” Kim proved that whatever sonic force or magnitude his playing may lack is more than offset by his nuanced sensitivity, silken expressiveness, and understated authority.
The indispensable accomplice to each of these virtuosos was principal cellist Robert deMaine (Los Angeles Philharmonic). Out of the solo spotlight but very much front and center in workload, he did the cello section’s heavy lifting all evening long with tireless skill. When called to take a bow, he shrugged and let his cello, held aloft, absorb the heated applause.
Maybe bringing together world-class musicians from different institutions frees them from day-to-day section politics and overfamiliarity. They not only rediscover the joy of music making but, surrounded by elite peers, push their envelopes. The best bring out each other’s best.
