There are many different directions a summer music festival can go in, from robust classics to new music to more populist offerings that have appeal beyond the base of classical aficionados.
If you’re the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, you do all of those things.
The Music Academy’s 78th season, which takes place June 15 through Aug. 9, offers listeners deep dives into the classics, including a fully staged production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and a season-finale performance of Gustav Mahler’s massive Third Symphony. This summer also inaugurates a new Composers in Context series featuring world premieres and artist conversations.
And in something of a departure from past seasons, the lineup is also reaching out to the broader community with family-friendly fare, including a bilingual adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and a live-to-picture performance of John Williams’s score to that 1975 Steven Spielberg classic: Jaws.
“We’re making a deliberate effort to meet our community where they are,” said Chief Artistic Officer Nate Bachhuber. “Jaws is the first film with live orchestra we’ve done at the Music Academy. It’s great music, and the film’s 50th anniversary is a great reason to do it.”
And with movies live in concert becoming more and more common at orchestras across the country, “we’re also thinking about what skills [our Music Academy] fellows will need in their careers,” Bachhuber added. “We’re empowering them for the careers they’re going to have.”
In addition, this year’s festival places an emphasis on “connecting music [across] generations,” Bachhuber said. “You’ll be seeing artists like Jeremy Denk and Sasha Cooke performing alongside our fellows. That creates a sort of living ecosystem where everyone learns from each other.”
Denk and Cooke take part in a chamber concert celebrating the 150th birthday of Maurice Ravel on June 26. Denk also presents a three-part lecture and performance series on Beethoven’s piano sonatas July 15–17.
The Takács Quartet, in its 50th-anniversary season, performs June 20 and 26.
The new Composers in Context series consists of three evenings, July 2 and 25 and Aug. 1, each curated by one or more of this summer’s guest composers: Andy Akiho, Huang Ruo, inti figgis-vizueta, and Kamala Sankaram. Akiho also performs movements from his 2023 work Sculptures, a Music Academy co-commission that utilizes a giant percussive bronze and steel head, on July 3 and 5.
Akiho is one of this year’s Mosher Guest Artists, along with violinist Randall Goosby and soprano Christine Goerke. Goosby performs a chamber concert on June 25 with two Academy alums: his brother, cellist Miles Goosby, and pianist Zhu Wang. He’s also the soloist in Ernest Chausson’s Poème with the Academy Festival Orchestra on June 28. Goerke gives a public master class on July 31 and performs Hector Berlioz’s The Death of Cleopatra with the orchestra on Aug. 2.
Don Giovanni takes the stage July 18 and 20 in a new production set in 1930s Hollywood, Christian Reif conducting. Conductors for this year’s orchestral concerts include Anthony Parnther, Stéphane Denève, and Miguel Harth-Bedoya, who leads Mahler’s Third on Aug. 9.
Subscriptions are now on sale; tickets to individual events go on sale May 1. For more information, visit the Music Academy’s website or call 805-969-8787.
