NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — In the closing all-Handel concert of its annual eight-day celebration of 17th- and 18th-century music, the Baroque Music Festival of Corona del Mar — a neighborhood in coastal Newport Beach — ably sustained the nearly half-century mission of its late co-founder, Burton Karson: serving up superbly performed, often uncommon Baroque music on period instruments.
When he retired in 2010, Karson had grown the festival into a financially viable enterprise featuring neglected pre-Classical works, nationally known guest artists, and a well-rounded blend of orchestral concerts and chamber and vocal music. In 2011 violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, the festival’s concertmaster from 1997, was invited to succeed Karson as the festival’s second artistic director. Channeling her experience as concertmaster of San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the International Handel Festival in Goettingen, Germany, performance credits on some 88 albums (not all Baroque), faculty work at Juilliard and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and, not least, her passionate artistic advocacy, Blumenstock proved an inspired choice.
In conversation, it’s immediately clear that Blumenstock’s ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it approach as artistic director stems not at all from temerity or inertia but from deep respect for Karson’s festival model: intimate, community-centered, and high-standard. When Blumenstock took the festival helm, “I thought it was pretty great,” she said. “I love the fact that it’s a limited festival, in the sense that we’re not trying to expand and get slick and have bigger venues and call in [only] world-famous soloists. I’m really proud of its community nature. So I have not tampered with it except in two relatively small ways. In Burton’s years, the Monday [concert] was always an organ recital. It was wonderful for those who love organ recitals, but it was also the least well-attended, by and large, concert of the festival, and I felt we could do some other things, so I’ve broadened that.”
Two years ago, Blumenstock rolled out her second tweak: replacing Karson’s traditional Friday chamber concert on modern instruments with Baroque chamber music on predominately period instruments. “I’m so steeped in the historical approach that [modern instrumentation] just doesn’t feel like a natural fit for me. I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a little bit of earlier Classical repertoire?’ Our audience goers come because they love Baroque music. It opens up a whole area of repertoire that was not really available. It’s fun and great music.”
Thus, this year’s Friday concert on June 26 featured a string quartet and guitarist Marc Teicholz performing two Boccherini guitar quintets (G. 448 and G. 451), soloing in Fernando Sor’s Introduction and Variations on “Gentil Housard,” and one of this festival’s four neglected gems: Manuel Braulio Canales López’s String Quartet in D major.
In a pre-festival interview, in her unstuffy, illuminating program notes, and in her brief concert comments, Blumenstock communicates an eloquent and erudite passion for the music. Though she deflects compliments on her programming skills, for the festival’s 46th and her 16th season, she found a curatorial throughline: nationalistically focused concerts (French, German, Italian, Spanish) and an overriding “philosophical” theme.
“All my themes for the festival are very, very casual,” she said. “They’re not hardcore or scholarly, really. But I do want to try to unify what we’re doing over the course of the festival. I had wanted to end the festival with Handel’s St. Cecilia Ode [HWV 76],” which uses a John Dryden poem, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” (1687), to unfurl a harmonia mundi cosmogony. “I suddenly thought of [Jean-Féry] Rebel’s Les Elemens [1737-38], which begins entirely without harmony, with an evocation of chaos. I thought oh, well, that’s how to begin the festival: Beginning with no harmony at all, we’ll make this journey through different nationalities and treatments [or] use of harmony.”
The festival finale June 28 at Newport Beach’s St. Mark Presbyterian Church brought the opening concert’s chaos theme full circle in the closing piece. Handel’s St. Cecilia cantata animates Dryden’s imagining of music’s “heav’nly harmony” as the force by which “the great Creator” imposed order on chaos. Though programmed relatively rarely (even at Handel festivals), Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day bristles with the craft and charm of Handel’s better-known works: lovely, expressive voice writing and skillful setting of a text written as if for that purpose.
Cued to the text and score, the all-star festival orchestra stepped up to Handel’s spotlight: baroque flutist Stephen Schultz (“The soft complaining flute”), cellist Eva Lymenstull (“Jubal struck the chorded shell”), lutenist Jason Yoshida (“whisper’d by the warbling lute”), organist Ian Pritchard (“the sacred organ’s praise”), trumpeter Kathryn Adduci (“The trumpet’s loud clangour”), timpanist Simon Carroll (“the double, double, double beat of the thundering drum”), and Blumenstock’s violins (“Sharp violins proclaim their jealous pangs”).
In an intriguing twist, which Blumenstock flagged in her concert comments, at the end of time chaos returns (“music shall untune the sky”), yet a post-judgment higher harmony ultimately provides redemption (“the dead shall live”).
The concert’s two soloists, tenor Nicholas Phan and emerging-star soprano Hannah De Priest, rose splendidly not only to the ode’s challenges but also to the first half’s closer, Handel’s “O Sing unto the Lord a New Song” (1717-18, based on Psalms 93 and 96). Phan’s career is international, and his repertoire stretches far beyond the Baroque. Co-founder and artistic director of Art Song Chicago, he has a flair for bringing texts like Dryden’s alive with color and nuance. His second aria, “Sharp violins proclaim,” was a small tour de force of expressive illumination.
Musical America New Artist of the Month in March 2026 for her well-received Arcadian Dreams solo debut, DePriest used her bright, radiant soprano to caress and energize Handel’s vocal writing. Superbly supporting them in both pieces was the festival’s excellent eight-member chorus. Blumenstock led from her concertmaster’s chair with quiet authority.
The concert opened with a pleasing performance of the Concerto Grosso in D minor, Op. 3, No. 5, cobbled together by Handel’s publisher (without the composer’s knowledge, permission, or apparent objection) from disparate works he’d written in 1720. In the festival’s hands, it all seemed to flow just fine.
After five decades on the road, Blumenstock has more than earned a comfortable retirement. “It’s been a very challenging and high-energy career,” Blumenstock said. “I fly 40 times a year. That’s a lot, so I want to live long enough to expiate my carbon footprint.” With DNA that sustained her mother to 105 years, Blumenstock should have decades of expiating ahead at her New Mexico home. While the festival begins the search for its third artistic director this fall, Blumenstock’s retirement won’t come until at least 2028, when she’ll lead Bach’s sprawling Mass in B Minor.
She is optimistic about Baroque music’s future. “I don’t think there’s any dearth of talent or passion among young people,” she said. “It’s clear to me that there’s definitely a lot of people interested. My only concern is the world they’re inheriting, and hoping they can make that work for them. Because this is a scary time for our planet, and our species, and every other species, let alone culture.”
