San Diego’s Mainly Mozart festival concluded its six-concert 2025 season Saturday with triumphs on and off stage.
Led by its wittily charismatic music director, Michael Francis, the festival’s All-Star Orchestra — concertmasters and principals from elite ensembles like the Philadelphia and Cleveland Orchestras; Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphonies; and Berlin, New York and LA Philharmonics — brought crisp playing and virtuosic sonority to Mozart’s frothy Così fan tutti overture before rocking Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and Seventh Symphony.
Triple concertos for piano, cello, and violin are surpassingly rare (have you heard Alfredo Casella, Dimitri Smirnov, or Siegfried Matthus’s recently?), yet Beethoven’s will be performed at least 40 times worldwide this year alone. Fortunately, Saturday’s soloists — Van Cliburn winner Joyce Yang, Berlin Phil concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley, and the LA Phil principal cello Robert DeMaine — made the element of surprise look overrated.
Yang’s playful, gregarious delivery made you forget Beethoven assigned the piano a mostly bridging or developing function. Needing only one backward glance to synchronize with her trio mates, Yang’s color and rhythmic drive nicely offset Bendix-Balgley and DeMaine’s soulful lyricism.
Iconoclastically, Beethoven gave the heavy melodic lifting to the cello, and DeMaine stepped up with a golden tone, effortless (seeming) technique, sure intonation, and a controlled, always musical vibrato. Bendix-Balgley supported DeMaine selflessly, the two duetting beautifully in the second-movement largo. When Beethoven shone the soloistic spotlight on him, in the second and the third movements especially, Bendix-Balgley showed why he was the first-ever American to become the Berlin Phil’s concertmaster.
One Beethoven biographer notes that the “gorgeous but peculiar” Triple Concerto “never caught on in [Beethoven’s] lifetime, and scarcely later,” partly because of its “sometimes backward-looking style.” In contrast, his Seventh Symphony, composed seven to eight years later, was the best received of his symphonies to that point (the audience even forced an encore of the second movement) and was praised by everyone from Berlioz to Wagner (“the apotheosis of dance itself”). Where Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has suffered from overprogramming, the Seventh retains its power to surprise and charm.
Francis introduced the piece with appropriate reverence and conducted it with obvious pleasure. The All-Stars (Bendix-Balgley and DeMaine blending back into their sections) met the moment with a muscular, riveting, thoroughly assured performance. Highlights included the flirtatious call-and-response between strings and flautist Jeffrey Khaner leading into Khaner’s jaunty first movement Vivace theme, the nicely growling menace of the lower strings in the second movement Allegretto, and the fine dervish frenzy the strings whipped up in the final movement.
Outstanding individual contributions from oboeist Dwight Parry (Cincinnati Symphony), clarinetist Boris Allakhverdyan (LA Phil), trumpeters Anthony Limoncelli and Ansel Norris (Cincinnati Symphony and Florida Orchestra, respectively), and timpanist Jauvon Gilliam (National Symphony) helped the ensemble transcend both the Epstein Family Amphitheater’s unflattering sound system and ambient trolley clangs, bird caws, overflying jets, and mid-concert conversations.
Before the concert began, CEO and co-founder Nancy Laturno took the Epstein stage to deliver potentially transformative news for the thirty-seven-year-old homegrown festival. After conceiving a $1,000,000 Securing the Future campaign on Monday, June 23, she announced that, a mere five days later, $675,000 had already been raised. The next day Laturno updated that figure for me (“we are currently at $700,000!”) and shared that the number of sellouts in the 2025 season surpassed 2024 “by far.”
Though 2023 remains the top grossing Mainly Mozart festival ever, 2025 was “a close second.” Mark Laturno added: “This is the most profitable festival we’ve ever done though as far as the net goes.”
So in a post-COVID arts scene where federal dollars are suddenly scarce, Mainly Mozart has both musical and financial reasons for optimism.
Paul S. Bodine has been writing about music for over 30 years for publications such as Classical Voice North America, Times of San Diego, Orange County Register, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the artists he’s interviewed are Joshua Bell, Herbert Blomstedt, Sarah Chang, Ivan Fischer, Bruno Canino, Christopher O’Reilly, Lindsay String Quartet, and Paul Chihara.
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