ORCHESTRA FEST SET FOR LA JOLLA VENUES
Amphitheater, concert hall chosen for 2024 Mainly Mozart series
Since 2020, San Diego’s Mainly Mozart has made an art form of pivoting — from becoming the nation’s first classical music presenter to present drive-in concerts during the pandemic shutdown to reinventing its decades-old indoor summer season as an entirely open-air event.
This June will see the plucky nonprofit pivot yet again as it bids farewell to the Del Mar Surf Cup Sports Park — the home of its allstar Festival of the Orchestras since 2021 — and holds all of the festival’s 2024 concerts in La Jolla.
Running June 20-29, this year’s edition will feature four outdoor concerts at the University of California San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheater and two in the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall. Tickets for all six concerts are now on sale on the Mainly Mozart website.
“We did a test run last year with two concerts at the Epstein and the Conrad, and people responded really positively,” said Mainly
Mozart Communications Director Mark Laturno.
“And we have a longstanding relationship with UCSD,” added Mainly Mozart co-founder and CEO Nancy Laturno, Mark’s mother. “So, it’s great to be at a permanently established venue that will just keep getting better.”
Several soloists will perform at this year’s Festival of the Orchestras, including soprano Erica Petrocelli, violinist Stefan Jackiw, cellist Robert DeMaine and pianist George Li.
The repertoire will feature works by Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Dvorak and other composers. As at previous editions of the festival, which debuted in 1988 at downtown San Diego’s Balboa Theatre, the ensemble at each concert will feature the concertmasters from some of the nation’s leading orchestras.
Dividends and challenges
Holding all of its 2021 and 2022 summer festivals at Del Mar Surf Cup Sports Park — which was also the site of two of last year’s con
far too long, impacting the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people and U.S. Navy Seal special operation forces who train in those waters,” Newsom said in his letter. “Congress must act quickly to approve the President’s proposal and provide this much needed, urgent funding.”
The plea to Congress to greenlight the $310 million also comes in the form of a state resolution. Last week, California lawmakers introduced a resolution that urges release of the money, as well as pleads for Biden to declare the sewage crisis an emergency.
Assembly Joint Resolution 12, sponsored by several legislators including San Diego’s Assemblymember David Alvarez and Sen. Steve Padilla, comes at the request of Imperial Beach Mayor Paloma Aguirre, who said the Legislature should declare the crisis an emergency,
even just symbolically, because the Newsom administration has repeatedly made the case that the issue is a federal one.
The resolution, however, only calls on Biden, not Newsom or the Legislature, to proclaim a state of emergency to expedite solutions. Newsom’s administration said Tuesday via email that the governor is focused on advocating for federal money to address the federal facility, and that the state has already invested more than $32 million in projects to mitigate border pollution.
“It is the federal government’s responsibility to complete the capital improvements to the facility that are required to stop the ongoing harmful discharges into the marine environment that are impacting public health, the local economy, and ecosystems and species in coastal communities,” Newsom said in his letter to Congress.
Pollution has worsened over the years because of an inoperable wastewater
plant in Baja California, a pipeline rupture, severe rainstorms and deferred maintenance to the South Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant. The latter is a federal facility managed by the International Boundary and Water Commission on federally owned land in San Ysidro. The plan has been to double the capacity of wastewater it treats from Tijuana using $300 million that was previously secured. But those funds are now expected to fall short because the plant is in disrepair.
Earlier this month, Mexico broke ground on a longawaited replacement for its crumbling wastewater treatment plant that officials said will dramatically reduce the discharge of sewage that repeatedly reaches South County shorelines.
To increase the pressure on federal officials, several San Diego residents and officials, including Aguirre and Chula Vista Mayor John McCann, flew to Washington, D.C., on Monday to advocate for the $310 million for the
South Bay plant.
“We need to fix that plant and we need to double its capacity,” Aguirre said in a video from D.C. that she posted on her social media Monday. “But right now everything is riding on Congress. So, we want to make sure that we spend our days, the next 48 hours, advocating for that funding to be approved.”
The calls come as another major storm is expected to bear down on the region and potentially worsen the situation. Last week’s devastating storm brought more than 14 billion gallons of sewage-tainted waters to San Diego, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission.
“This storm brought the highest peak flow in the Tijuana River since 1993 and the (fourth) highest peak flow since the IBWC began operating the river gage in 1962,” said Morgan Rogers, are operations manager for the IBWC.
Tuesday, June 25 Britten: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10; Tchaikovsky: Serenade, Op. 48
Tickets: Early-bird tickets will be on sale through March 1, after which there will be a 10 percent increase. Single tickets for the Epstein Family Theater concerts range from $25 to $149 per person. Tickets for the Baker-Baum Concert Hall performances range from $40 to $149.
Phone: (619) 239-0100
Online: mainlymozart.org
The San Diego Union-Tribune, P.O. Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191