Southwest Chamber Music Announces 

20th Summer Festival at The Huntington

Los Angeles, CA - Southwest Chamber Music celebrates its twentieth summer season at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens by presenting its popular blending of familiar favorites with the added spice of musical diversity. The programs begin Saturday, July 13 (repeated July 14), at 7:30 p.m. and continue every other weekend through Saturday and Sunday, August 24 and 25. 

The celebratory programs this summer open with the wind music of Stravinsky and Mozart, bringing together masterpieces of 18th century classicism with the 20th century neo-classicism of Paris. Oliver Knussen's music, inspired by A.A. Milne's beloved Winnie the Pooh, will feature the stratospheric soprano Delaram Kamareh. Knussen writes, "[It is like] a sequence of faded snapshots and reflections, by an unwilling grown-up, on things remembered from the book, and on what those things meant to him as a child."

On July 27 and 28, Southwest celebrates night music from elegant Salzburg, a journey to the New World of Mayan astrology, and concludes with a nocturnal work from fin de siècle Vienna. Gabriela Ortiz's Baalkah conjures up the pre-Colombian world in a masterpiece which brings this past world to musical life, featuring soprano Ayana Haviv. The evening's festivities open with one of Mozart's most beloved works, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and close with Schoenberg's early nocturnal work, Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night).

A true Wagnerian rarity, Album Leaf for Betty Schott, opens the concert August 10 and 11. The Album Leaf is a thank you note in the form of a solo piano score written by Wagner to his publisher. Max Reger's Clarinet Quintet, his last chamber work, is perhaps his best known and most beloved. The evening ends festively with the Brahms Horn Trio.

The final concert, August 24 and 25, is an evening of music by three great opera composers of the 20th century: Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze and Leos Janácek. To celebrate Britten's centennial, Southwest Chamber Music offers two works for harp and voice, Eight Folksong Arrangements and A Birthday Hansel with tenor Daniel Chaney and harpist Alison Bjorkedal. Henze's L'autunno is an Italianate opera for winds featuring a cornucopia of instruments including piccolo, alto flute, oboe d'amore, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, and a Wagner tuba which are doubled by the traditional wind quintet. The summer concludes with Mladi for wind sextet, the wise remembrances of childhood from Czech master Leos Janácek. 

Pre-concert dinners are available at an additional charge in the elegantly romantic Huntington Tea Room. The three-course menu is prepared by Jon Dubrick, Executive Chef at The Huntington Tea Room.  The dinners are available only with pre-order by concert ticket holders on the Southwest website www.swmusic.org or at (800) 726-7147 when you order your concert tickets.  

Click here to download season brochure.