Welcome to the 71st Season

When the 2017 Music Academy of the West (MAW) summer festival came to a close, the question arose: How do you follow a four-year partnership with the New York Philharmonic that culminated with music director Alan Gilbert‘s final appearance with arguably the country’s greatest symphony orchestra in a massive concert at SBCC’s stadium, the largest classical music event in Santa Barbara history?

Easy. You go global.

The Academy has announced a new international collaboration, a four-year partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), one of the world’s most venerable and formidable such ensembles known for both innovative programming and exemplary management. Conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas – who just visited Santa Barbara leading his other orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, in a CAMA-sponsored concert at the Granada in mid-March – serves as Signature Festival Conductor of the partnership and will oversee its launch in a panel discussion at the Academy this summer. Six LSO musicians will be in residence at the 2018 festival as guest artists, appearing as both teachers and performers, including Elim Chan, winner of the 2014 Donatella Flick LSO Conducting Competition, principal second violin David Alberman, principal cello Rebecca Gilliver, principal clarinet Andrew Marriner, principal trumpet David Elton, and principal percussion Neil Percy.

Tilson Thomas and other key LSO conductors and musicians will perform and teach at the Academy, with the full orchestra in residence during the 2019 and 2021 festivals. In addition, 12 Academy Fellows – two more than the N.Y. Phil partnership – will travel to London each winter for 10-day apprenticeships with LSO music director Sir Simon Rattle and the orchestra, while the winners of the Academy’s annual Solo Piano and Marilyn Horne Song competitions will be presented in recital at London’s LSO St. Luke’s in addition to their stateside mini-tour. Other partnership plans include multiple co-commissions by the Academy and the LSO, including a new children’s opera for U.S. premiere at the 2021 festival.

But that’s only one of the big announcement of the ambitious new season, MAW’s 71st, as the 2017 Community Concert stirs the heart of Montecito, which suffered the successive disasters of the Thomas Fire and mudslide/debris flow over the winter. To honor both the local first responders and serve as a healing offering, the concert that closes the season on August 11 brings the community a redemptive message of hope via a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the “Resurrection.” Gustavo Dudamel – the firebrand music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which visits Santa Barbara every year as part of CAMA’s International Series – will conduct the concert to be performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and the Academy Festival Orchestra, the ensemble featuring nearly all of the festival’s instrumental Fellows. As before, to maximize access, more than 4,000 tickets will be priced at just $10 each while all 7- to 17-year-olds will be admitted free with an adult.

Dudamel will also serve as one of this summer’s Mosher guest artists, along with French pianist David Fray, British baritone Simon Keenlyside, and – combining with another new MAW specialty – the program’s composer-in-residence, Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer Prize-winningformer student of longtime faculty artist Kathleen Winkler who premiered a commissioned piece dedicated to her former teacher at last year’s festival.

Among the other highlights is the expansion of the Composer-in-Residence program to six artists, including Shaw; Guillaume Connesson, one of the most widely performed French composers; brass specialist Timothy Higgins; Hannah Lash, winner of an ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Award; Elizabeth Ogonek, currently completing a three-year tenure as composer-in-residence at the Chicago Symphony; and returnee James Stephenson, whose Martha Uncaged was one of the highlights of last summer’s festival.

The summer will also bring the MAW festival debut of James Conlon, the Grammy Award-winning music director of Los Angeles Opera, who will conduct the 2018 opera, a new production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro from returnee James Darrah at the Granada Theatre in early August. To celebrate this year’s Leonard Bernstein centennial, a fully staged new production of the composer’s jazz-infused one-act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, conducted by Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony music director Edwin Outwater, closes out the pair of annual OperaFest offerings.

The Academy’s Classical Evolution/Revolution Conference, which made its debut early last season, also returns, while Stéphane Denève, music director of the Brussels Philharmonic and the incoming music director of the St. Louis Symphony – which also appeared during the just-concluded CAMA season – makes his MAW debut as a conductor for the Festival Orchestra for a special French-themed “Bastille Day” program on July 14.

Summer Festival Subscriptions go on sale Monday, April 30, and single tickets are available for purchase starting May 19. Call 969-8787 or visit www.musicacademy.org.