The FLUX Quartet: SummerFest’s Powerful Champions of the Avant Garde

As a salute to the UC San Diego Department of Music, La Jolla SummerFest’s host for most of the 2018 music festival’s concerts, Music Director Cho-Liang Lin featured two of the university’s resident composers in his festival’s annual program of contemporary music: Rand Steiger’s new work “Tropes” and Lei Liang’s 2005 “Serashi Fragments.”

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A Handel Triumph for Opera NEO

If you are going to produce a rarely staged G. F. Handel opera, it is a good thing to have a few Handel operas under your belt. Opera NEO’s vibrant, superbly sung “Partenope” this past weekend (August 3 & 5) revealed how confidently this company has succeeded in making these Baroque operas as dramatically engaging as the popular verismo warhorses.

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La Jolla SummerFest Opens with a Sophisticated Musical Menagerie

This season of La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest brings down the curtain on Music Director Cho-Liang Lin’s superb 18-year tenure with the festival. Friday’s opening concert offered sublime chamber works by Bartók and Villa-Lobos, as well as wit and charm in Saint-Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals.”

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