“The 2020 edition of SummerFest, the La Jolla Music Society’s 35-year-old chamber music celebration, has been reconfigured three times since being announced in March as a marathon event spanning 22 days and 18 concerts,” writes George Varga in Sunday’s (8/16) San Diego Union-Tribune. “On Aug. 5, the resurgent pandemic forced SummerFest to shelve its ambitious plans to host a reduced-capacity, socially distanced audience of 130 in The Conrad’s 513-seat Baker-Baum Concert Hall. ‘We held out to the last possible moment to see if anything changed that would have allowed us to have a live audience,’ [pianist and music director Inon] Barnatan said…. The six 2020 SummerFest concerts will be livestreamed, with only the musicians and production crew present. In addition to Barnatan and [cellist Alisa] Weilerstein, the performers include violinists James Ehnes and Tessa Lark, cellist Clive Greensmith, violinist/violist Yura Lee and contrabassist Michael Thurber…. Each concert will last about an hour, with no intermission…. The festival will conclude, offline, with a sold-out Aug. 30 gala at the Lodge at Torrey Pines, where the performers will be on the lawn as attendees listen and watch from their hotel room balconies.”
La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest narrows to six concerts, live-streamed
Posted on: August 20, 2020