Mainly Marathon

Sound

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you attended a symphony concert in which all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos were played in a single evening? Wouldn’t that be——to quote Emperor Joseph II’s infamous (and probably apocryphal) critique of Mozart——“too many notes?” An evening of Wagnerian length in which no Wagner is played?

Well, let’s see. Adding up all the time on my compact-disc box set of the five meaty masterpieces played by Alfred Brendel, that comes to 178 minutes of music——or just about three hours, without intermissions. Surprisingly, that’s only 30 minutes longer than either of Wagner’s shorter operas, The Flying Dutchman and The Rheingold.

So it certainly sounds “do-able,” as they say. And come June 10, it will, in fact, be done as the inaugural offering of the 20th annual Mainly Mozart Festival in the newly restored Balboa Theatre, the festival’s new summer home. A brilliant Beethoven interpreter, British pianist John Lill, will be at the keyboard, and dynamic British conductor David Atherton will be on the podium.

Lill is something of a veteran when it comes to Beethoven marathons. He’s played all the Beethoven concerti and piano sonatas here in past years, but never all the concerti in a single night.

As for Atherton, we might call him San Diego’s presiding genius of music. Twenty years ago, the idea of our now unmatched Mozart festival came to him out of the balmy blue air of Balboa Park. Sitting in the Lowell Davies Festival Theatre, unfazed by screams of peacocks and the roar of airplanes approaching Lindbergh Field, Atherton thought, “What about a top-flight music festival, maybe in the summer?” Meetings followed with former San Diego Symphony director of public relations and marketing Nancy Laturno (now Laturno Bojanic) and violinist, concertmaster, conductor, teacher and violist Andrés Cárdenes. All sorts of civic-minded folks jumped on board, and an initial budget was set at $250,000. You’d need $2 million today.

With time, the festival grew and explored innumerable venues. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine anywhere in town or over the border where the Mainly Mozart people have not been over the past 20 years. The Balboa Theatre venue offers an unaccustomed stability. Journalist Preston Turegano is currently assembling what will no doubt be a definitive history of the organization, with its complex comings and goings and its many artists, sponsors and donors.

As for me, without having to remember all the precise details, I can easily call to mind 19 years of blissful Mozartian summers of great performances. They all blur together in one gigantic impressionistic mass. Naturally, all the wonderful MM music has not been composed by Mozart alone. As in years past, this month’s concerts include a variety of masters plus an especially featured composer, Richard Strauss——a 20th-century Romantic master often paired with Mozart in music and opera festivals.

Following the opening Beethoven bash, the concerts include Strauss and Mozart plus Tchaikovsky (June 12), Haydn, Schumann and Liszt (June 13), Schubert and Weber (June 14), Kreisler and Schubert (June 15), Saint-Saëns and Ravel (June 17), Debussy and Brahms (June 19) and Lutoslawski and Berg (June 20). The final concert on June 21 concludes with both featured composers by themselves.

As usual, many of the world’s top musicians will play in both the chamber and orchestral ensembles. A visit to the Mainly Mozart Web site (mainlymozart.org) offers a quick survey of the riches being offered.

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