Tag archives: Music Academy of the West

Your faithful correspondent was not able to attend as many MAW performances as he would have liked this summer, but the few that were attended revealed that the Academy is making great progress in its ambitious endeavor to be the most important summer institute in the land, a good omen for the just-launched Shauna Quill […]

It’s a wrap! The Music Academy of the West marked the finale of its 77th Summer Festival with the Academy Festival Orchestra at the Granada under Finnish conductor Hannu Lintu playing Mahler’s “Symphony No. 6 in A Minor, ‘Tragic.’” Lintu, 56, graduated the Sibelius Academy in 1996 and took up the baton as chief conductor […]

The Music Academy of the West has awarded its 2024 Duo Competition winners to cellist Shengyu Meng and pianist Yoshino Toi, with each receiving $5,000 cash and digital assets for career promotion. Meng, from Shanghai, is earning her bachelor’s degree at the Colburn Conservatory of Music. She was former principal cellist at the California Young […]

Clarinet fellow Katia Sofia Waxman is winding up her first and likely only summer at the Music Academy of the West after earning a master’s degree from Juilliard while majoring in both music and economics at Oberlin. The Chicago native said she was lucky to get to attend the “pinnacle summer festival” for its faculty […]

The Music Academy of the West launched a directing fellow position three years ago, but MAW still doesn’t have something similar for conductor trainees, despite offering five to six orchestral concerts every summer. If they ever decided to create such a position, luring David Robertson to direct it would be a great idea. The Malibu-raised […]

Lawrence Brownlee is one of today’s most celebrated bel canto tenors, in demand for opera performances as well as song cycle recitals with major orchestras across the country and around the world. He’s particularly praised for his interpretations of Rossini – his Grammy-nominated album Virtuoso Rossini Arias prompted famed New Yorker critic Alex Ross to […]

Carmen, Bizet’s classic opera, never loses its entertainment value. Having last seen it when it was staged by Opera Santa Barbara a year ago, the latest production at the Granada, courtesy of the Music Academy of the West’s Summer Festival, was a decidedly contemporary twist on the Spanish love story conducted by Daniela Candillari, principal […]

Ken Cazan, the director of the Music Academy 2024 opera Carmen, last helmed a production of the famed and beloved work nearly 30 years ago, and has been happily ensconced in recent years taking on smaller, more experimental pieces. But he was tempted to field the fiery fan favorite once again by both the offer […]

Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell, music director of London’s Academy of St, Martin-in-the-Fields, joined iconic pianist Jeremy Denk in a dazzling duo performance at the Granada. The tony twosome’s concert, part of the Music Academy of the West’s Summer Festival, featured works by Franck, Beethoven, and Mozart. The sold-out 90-minute performance featured Mozart’s “Sonata No. 18 […]

The Music Academy of the West hosted the second of its five-part orchestra series when the Academy Festival Orchestra under conductor Anthony Parnther, the Yale-educated music director of the San Bernardino Symphony since 2019, performed at the Granada Theatre. Joan Huang’s “Tujia Dance,” and Florence Price’s “Symphony No. 3” kicked off the entertaining concert, wrapping […]

Corin Lee is the 2024 Alumni Enterprise Award winner at the Music Academy of the West for his innovative endeavor VR Practice. Lee attended the Miraflores campus as violin fellow in 2009 and today is a member of the Ethel string quartet and founder of the Liberated Performer, a program that trains and empowers performers […]

Timo Andres’ first visit to the Music Academy will include – for the fellows’ brass concert – the west coast premiere of the rising star pianist-composer’s “Land Lines”for triple brass quintet, as well as his “Tides and Currents” in the faculty concert at the Lobero. Andres once served on the judges panel for the fellows’ […]

Westmont alumnus and local resident Tim Beccue (’18) is back on campus, this time as a fellow of the Music Academy of the West. Since 2016, Westmont houses 140 exceptional young classical musicians each summer for the academy, which provides live events through Aug. 3. Visit musicacademy.org for a full calendar of concerts.  “I have […]

The Music Academy audience has already seen a lot of Jeremy Denk. The piano great is in his 10th season as a faculty teaching artist on campus, which assignment began less than two years after Denk was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and the summer after he served as the Ojai Festival’s music director. In […]

Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, 71, former musical director of the Seoul Philharmonic, was in fine form at the Granada when he led the Academy Festival Orchestra in its first performance of the summer festival season. The highly entertaining concert opened with Wagner’s Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. and Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, concluding […]

When Paige Cameron enrolled at Northwestern in her home state of Illinois to study vocal performance, the plan was to sing her way to stardom.  “I really thought I was going to be an opera singer,” said Cameron, who goes by either she or they and has recently decided to lop off her hyphenated last […]

The ever-entertaining Takács Quartet was in superb form at the sold out Lobero as they performed in the first week of the Music Academy of the West’s 77th Summer Festival. The Fab Four – violinists Edward Dusinberre and Harumi Rhodes, cellist András Fejér, and Grammy-winning violist Richard O’Neill, formerly with Camerata Pacifica – are currently […]

Maybe the Music Academy of the West had some unanticipated smarts in scheduling the annual Percussion Fest for the first Saturday of the season, just four days into the 2024 Summer Festival. With the fellows flying in from San Francisco, Cleveland, Houston, and New York and driving up from L.A. they’d all have to arrive […]

You might say Navasard Hakobyan had a pretty good summer in Santa Barbara last year. The Armenian baritone not only made his debut as Marcello, one of the principal roles in La Boheme at the Granada, he also secured the most coveted and longstanding prize of the festival in the Music Academy’s 2023 Marilyn Horne […]

Just days before the kickoff of its 77th summer festival, the Miraflores campus of the Music Academy of the West was packed with 225 supporters for the “Magic of the Music Academy: A New Era” gala with a special solo performance by top cellist Joshua Roman in Hahn Hall. Roman, 40, attended the academy in […]