At the Music Academy of the West, seasons follow a certain rough pattern. First the strings arrive and work together on becoming quartets. Then Larry Rachleff steps in and performs his magic act of pulling a coherent symphony orchestra performance out of the tiny top hat after just a week or so of rehearsal. As the various masterclasses tick by, time flies toward the concerto competitions in the first days of July. All the while, visiting artists come and go; glorious picnics are consumed. And then, at the beginning of August, in a flourish of collective energy, an opera production goes up, the final Festival Orchestra concerts take place, and the whole thing winds down again — eight weeks of intensive aesthetic immersion.
This time, however, a new climactic event has been added to the calendar, and it promises to be a memorable one. On Monday, August 2, just one day after the final performance of Rossini’s opera Cinderella at the Granada, a musical prince charming will appear in the form of Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic. As the Music Academy’s professional partnership with the N.Y. Phil moves into its second year, the full orchestra will arrive in Santa Barbara to play an unprecedented concert at the Santa Barbara Bowl. With tickets available for just $10, the event is designed to bring the music created at Miraflores to a larger audience than ever before. On the night after Cinderella, the Music Academy will be the belle of the Bowl.
The New York Philharmonic Bowl concert is only one part of a much larger strategy that Music Academy Vice President of Artistic Planning and Educational Programs Patrick Posey described as “making the relevance of the music accessible.” The era in which classical music is stereotyped as either irrevocably highbrow or irreversibly in decline has finally ended. This summer, according to Posey, there are living composers represented in “almost every concert,” and their music is not to be feared.