Michael Francis and Anne-Marie McDermott Inspire Exotic Fare in Opening Mainly Mozart Festival Concert

Michael Francis opened the 30th installment of San Diego’s annual Mainly Mozart Festival Saturday, June 9, with an ebullient orchestra concert that started with with Jean-Féry Rebel’s harmonically startling, rarely performed Baroque dance suite “Les Élémens,” jumped to Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 415, featuring soloist Anne-Marie McDermott—that composer’s equally assertive attack on late 18th-century Viennese rococo elegance—and closed with Beethoven’s Second Symphony.

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Hearing Schubert’s Wintry Song Cycle in San Diego Spring

Sunday’s chilly, May gray afternoon provided appropriate weather in which to consider Franz Schubert’s and poet Wilhelm Müller’s wintry song cycle “Die Winterreise,” with its morbid musings over a lonely midwinter trek. Baritone Michael Sokol and pianist Nicolas Reveles did the honors in the downtown San Diego Public Library’s Neil Morgan Auditorium,

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Sacra/Profana’s Bridge to Musical Nirvana

Sacra/Profana’s Associate Artistic Director Juan Carlos Acosta anchored the choral ensemble’s excellent program (given on May 19 & 20) with Canadian composer Larry Nickel’s secular cantata “When I Think of Bridges,” a U.S. premiere of the challenging 2007 work.

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