It’s summer in southern California and that translates, for music lovers, to the annual afternoon garden party of Jacaranda — celebrating ten years of adventurous chamber music performance. The smart music series commissions works by top living composers, and mixes that repertoire with challenging bits of the historic classical canon. To apply the group’s own tagline, the forward-leaning Jacaranda features “music at the edge.”
Music maven Patrick Scott, along with Mark Hilt Jacaranda’s co-artistic director, must have an ‘in’ with the man above. For this party invariably floats on L.A.’s softest air, its most golden sunlight. This year’s ‘do’ must surely be a penultimate; it will spool the last Sunday of June at Pacific Palisades arts mansion, Villa Aurora.
The party sets sail on flutes of champagne and niblets. Tours of the legendary library salon where fierce German intellectual Leon Feuchtwanger and his exotic wife Marta established an outpost for L.A.’s European exiles at mid-century are on offer.
Five acclaimed keyboard artists — Gloria Cheng, Mark Alan Hilt, Vicki Ray, Susan Svrcek, and Richard Valitutto — will perform musical miniatures by a wide range of composers.
Composers Respighi, Ades, Scriabin, Ung, Ives, Curran, Cage, and Dvorak, have all been invited and every last one has rsvp’ed. Yes, they will attend.
Between musical sets, hors d’oeuvres and more drinkies will be imbibed on the Villa’s landscaped lawn. Above, infinite blue sky; below, Santa Monica Bay. Inside tip: Jacaranda is offering a special two-for-one ticket drawing on its Facebook page.
Jacaranda Summer Garden Party | Villa Aurora | June 30 | tickets & info
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