This event is scheduled July 18-27, 2024.
Festival Mozaic’s schedule for its 2024 San Luis Obispo Summer Music Festival features 21 events over 10 days from July 18 to 27, including free recitals, a climactic orchestral concert, performances by music director and violinist Scott Yoo, and marquee soloists and artists from the nation’s finest orchestras.
“As we gather once again to celebrate the beauty and power of music, we embark on a journey of discovery, inspiration, and connection,” Yoo says of the series, which is not confined to a single genre, venue, or even the indoors. The natural beauty and architectural splendor of San Luis Obispo County shine throughout the lineup, as music lovers experience Baroque works, chamber pieces, world premieres, jazz, and Americana in missions and vineyards.
This season, Yoo adds a new role to his resume: composer. A July 19 chamber concert includes not one but two world premieres: Yoo’s Piano Quartet, op. 1, and Canadian piano virtuoso Stewart Goodyear’s Octet. The program concludes with the expansive Piano Quintet by Sibelius.
This year’s festival presents a wide range of music in forms ranging from free midday mini-concerts, to Peter and the Wolf on July 22 with dancers, to exploratory lecture-recitals on July 18 and 25 in which Yoo (host of the PBS program Now Hear This) guides festivalgoers through what makes masterworks tick. During a July 22 dinner, he discusses Felix Mendelssohn’s youthful Sextet at Cass Winery in Paso Robles.
The See Canyon Fruit Ranch hosts not one but two jazz groups on July 21: the musically omnivorous Quarteto Nuevo with San Luis Obispo’s own Ron McCarley Jazz Quartet opening. Local singer-songwriter Melody Klemin opens for Americana artists Tim Bluhm and The Coffis Brothers at the Dana Adobe Cultural Center in Nipomo on July 25.
The festival is screening two films: Chevalier, based on the life of Black violinist and composer Joseph Bologne on July 22, and Earl Kim, about one of Yoo’s musical mentors. Kim’s Where Grief Slumbers for soprano and chamber ensemble is a highlight of the fourth chamber concert on July 26, including Tchaikovsky’s passionate Souvenir de Florence for string sextet.
Yoo conducts Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on July 27 to close this summer season. The concert also features Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture and Wagner’s lush Wesendonck Lieder with German soprano Sarah Traubel.