This edition of ON the Beat was originally emailed to subscribers on June 27, 2024. To receive Josef Woodard's music newsletter in your inbox on Fridays, sign up at independent.com/newsletters.
After lapping up the diversions of Summer Solstice on Saturday — on parade and in various spaces around town — we were served up a hearty/heady triple shot of Wagner, Mahler, and Sibelius at The Granada Theatre, in the debut performance by this year’s Academy Festival Orchestra (AFO). Once again, the brand-new orchestra arm of the Music Academy of the West , boldly conducted by Osmo Vänskä, impressed on impact (read review here ), and with this annual curtain-raising event, the Music Academy festival is officially up and running and luring local music lovers into its calendar-making clutches through early August.
Looking at the next week’s agenda, two significant tentpole events leap to mind. This Saturday’s AFO concert at the Granada, conducted by returning maestro Anthony Parnther, presents a rare chance to hear Stravinsky’s modernist masterwork Rite of Spring, anchoring a venturesome program along with the late Black composer Florence Price’s “Symphony No. 3” and the very much living composer Joan Huang’s “Tujia Dance.”