Mainly Mozart concerts have been moveable feasts the past three years, thanks to COVID-19. When the pandemic shut down live performances in March 2020, the Balboa Theatre was no longer a viable venue.
In June of that year, Mainly Mozart came back with the country’s first live classical music performance, an amplified string ensemble playing on a riser in a dusty parking lot near the Del Mar Fairgrounds. Attendees listened to the concert in their cars.
Since then, the festival moved to the paved lot by the fairgrounds, and from there to the Surf Cup Sports Park. Audiences left their vehicles to sit in a grass field to hear an amplified orchestra play inside a temporary acoustic bowl.
At its last concert in June, I endured a long, slow drive down a bone-rattling dirt road to park a hundred yards away from the seating. There in the chill, damp night, I enjoyed Mozart and Schubert while insects enjoyed me.
On Wednesday, the Mainly Mozart All-Star Orchestra opened The Center at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The ensemble had an unlikely partner in this venture, The Belly Up — purveyor of rock and pop music.
The moderately sized venue is a huge improvement in comfortable seating and access to alcohol for Mainly Mozart patrons.
Sonically, it’s a mixed bag. There’s no need to amplify instruments, so we can hear their unprocessed playing. Unfortunately, the acoustics suck the sound away as soon as bows leave strings. Winds, brass and percussion fare better.
The concert started shakily with Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin. Soloists Erin Hannigan (oboe) and Nathan Olson (violin) played gracefully. The 11 strings accompanying them had intonation difficulties in the first movement. The second movement is one of Bach’s most sublime melodies, but the accompaniment was tentative. The playing from all was matter-of-fact.
The performance finally congealed in the last movement, chugging along under conductor Michael Francis’ leadership.
More strings came out for Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K. 546. Francis selected this deep cut to illustrate the influence of Bach and Handel on Mozart. The additional players improved the ensemble sound, but the dry acoustics cut into any increased richness of tone.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born 150 years ago on Wednesday. To honor the occasion, Francis conducted the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” With even more strings onstage — five of them from the Mainly Mozart Youth Orchestra — the performance was exquisite. The spatialization of the two different string groups and the solo quartet was readily apparent. San Diegans don’t get to hear much of Vaughan Williams’ orchestral music, so featuring his works on different programs this week is a treat.
Francis dedicated a vigorous and appropriately regal performance of Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” to the memory of Queen Elizabeth II.
The printed program ended with a vivacious of the 17-year-old Mendelssohn’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture,” an act of compositional prodigy that even the wunderkind Mozart could not match. Francis prepped us for an encore, asking that we not applaud so they could segue into Arvo Pärt’s austere, mystical “Spiegel im Spiegel” (Mirror in a Mirror).
Originally composed for violin and piano, over the years Pärt arranged it for 11 other melodic instruments as well as solo organ. I’ve never heard the piano substituted by harp, but it worked surprisingly well with San Diego Symphony harpist Julie Phillips playing with her customary sensitivity along with violinist Jeffrey Multer.
These two enraptured us for 10 minutes, a moving and unexpected way to end the evening.
Hertzog is a freelance writer.
