Mozart and Martinis

By David Gregson

THE MAINLY MOZART FOLKS, ever in the vanguard when it comes to ideas for building audiences, have dreamed up yet another ingenious scheme—Cocktail Concerts. The San Diego Symphony has its Summer and Winter Pops, Young People’s Concerts and Masterwork Series, as well as an elaborate outreach program, but are they pushing stuffed olives?

Now in its 17th season under the inspired leadership of David Atherton, the Mainly Mozart Festival has helped dissolve international borders by expanding its operations into Baja California. The festival can truly claim to be a binational, public benefit organization that reaches a large audience. Additionally, it has adopted an astonishing variety of separate performance venues in San Diego County and Baja California. And through a first-rate series of Spotlight Concerts, it’s keeping the music going year-round. Mainly Mozart’s outreach program embraces 32,000 students, and heaven only knows how many young adults are going to be lured by the martinis.

Shaken, not stirred? The festival’s newest and undoubtedly hippest venues are the Shaker Room in Martini Ranch at 528 F Street in the Gaslamp Quarter and Laurel Restaurant & Bar at 505 Laurel Street near Balboa Park. The Fine Arts Quartet sets those joints jumping June 5, with the remarkable Jacques Thibaud String Trio following suit on June 12.

Now, whether joints actually jump to the music of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Glazunov and Françaix has yet to be demonstrated, but worry not if you are leery of the antics of a cocktail crowd. When the whole shebang gets going June 3, everyone can find his or her preferred niche, whether in the acoustically vibrant environment of the Neurosciences Institute on Torrey Pines Mesa or the uncomfortable pews at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue downtown. The locales are numerous, so check our music listings, visit mainlymozart.org, or call 619-239-0100 to sort it all out.

As usual, Atherton has lured many of the nation’s finest musicians to brighten our annual “June gloom”: violinists Ida Levin and William Preucil; cellist Ronald Thomas; pianists Anne-Marie McDermott, Rieko Aizawa and Mia Chung; French horn players Julie Landsman and John Cox; flautist Timothy Day and oboist Laura Griffiths—plus the aforementioned Fine Arts Quartet and Jacques Thibaud Trio.

The inspired deployment of these musicians over a large range of varied events is one of the particular joys of the Mainly Mozart Festival. We get piano and cello concertos with orchestra accompaniment, string quartets, solo piano recitals, violin and piano recitals, piano quartets—you name it. And there’s much more than Mozart to listen to. This season’s programming includes works by Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Copland, Schubert and even the seldom-heard Franz Schrecker, whose Chamber Symphony will be performed on the last day of the festival, June 25, in downtown’s Copley Symphony Hall.

As for those martinis? The idea is to allow an hour for cocktails and conversation “followed by an informal concert atmosphere where the artists ‘dress down’ and interact with the audience”— “undressing” not implied.

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