Another Full Classical Music Summer Dance Card in Store

The Music Academy of the West’s 78th Festival Season Has Multiple Treats Ahead

Natasha Kislenko and Miles Goosby performed at Hahn Hall. | Photo: Emma Matthews

Come summertime in Santa Barbara, in classical music circles, virtually all eyes and ears are fixed on the treasury of programming served up by the Music Academy of the West (MAW). The world-renowned summer music program, comparable to those in Aspen and Tanglewood, was founded in 1947 and lures celebrated world-class artists to town for a dense eight-week schedule of performances on and off of its picturesque Miraflores campus in Montecito. While the central goal of the academy is the care, feeding and training of highly qualified fellows, brought to town from around the world on a tuition-free basis, Santa Barbara’s listening public benefits greatly from the bounty of live festival offerings.

Executive Director Shauna Quill| Photo: Emma Matthews

The Academy recently hosted an official sneak peek at the coming festival program, led by Executive Director Shauna Quill and Chief Artistic Director Nate Bachhuber. Both administrators began their tenures with last year’s festival, and as Bachhuber pointed out to the gathered crowd, 2025’s roster is the first he personally presided over, having inherited last year’s schedule. Bachhuber served as the main tour guide for a selective run through what’s to come.

As an added treat, the preview also included a brief performance of a movement from Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 2 by cellist Miles Goosby, brother of cellist Randall Goosby, who will give a Mosher Guest Artist recital at Hahn Hall on June 25.

The full MAW season is too densely packed with series, subseries, open-to-the-public masterclasses, and events to get an easy handle on, but there are plenty of highlights and new features to mark calendars with. It all begins with the return of the Takács string quartet marking the season’s start, this year celebrating its 50th anniversary with a concert at the Lobero on June 20.

This year’s program also includes famed artists from just outside the classical scene, proper, expanding its potential audience base. The ever-popular “PercussionFest” has been moved from Hahn Hall to the spacious Granada Theatre, and features “The Bells,” a new piece written by and featuring Police drummer Stewart Copeland. In other shifting venue news, the fundraising gala is moving from Miraflores to the Montecito Club, on July 11, with progressive bluegrass mandolin wizard Chris Thile appearing as the featured artist — timed in advance of his eagerly awaited second album of solo music by Bach.

For the whole family, and pop culture synapse, the festival orchestra will perform a live score of John Williams’s music for Jaws, celebrating its 50th anniversary, at the Granada on June 21. Another family-friendly event is a performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (Pedro y el Lobo) in both English and Spanish, on Saturday morning, July 19, at the Lobero.

Executive Director Shauna Quill and Chief Artistic Director Nate Bachhuber introduce the program. | Photo: Emma Matthews

For orchestral music aficionados, summer Saturdays belong to the always surprisingly taut and talented Academy Festival Orchestra (AFO) — made up of fresh new musicians each summer — performing under the batons of well-established maestros at the Granada. This year’s list kicks off on June 28 with a return of conductor Anthony Parnther leading Ravel’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as a main event.

On July 5, conductor David Danzmayr leads an enticing program of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (featured in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey) and a MAW co-commissioned new work by percussionist Andy Akiho. July 12 brings “Poulenc & Piazzolla,” with music by the French and Argentinian composer. The program also features the piece warp & weft, by the late MAW alum and UCSB ECM head Sara Gibson, who tragically died of cancer last year at age 38.

Ravel, in his 150th birthday year, returns in the spotlight role of the August 2 concert, with his ever-popular Boléro matched with French music and led by the French phenom Stéphane Denève. As a fitting finale, the AFO goes epic with the August 9 performance of Mahler’s sweeping Symphony No. 3, led by maestro Miguel Harth-Bedoya.

MAW also boasts an especially strong vocal program, currently directed by John Churchwell and Sasha Cooke. The traditional summer highlight is a fully staged opera. This year’s operatic model, at the Granada on July 18 and 20, is Mozart’s Don Giovanni, set in the milieu of early Hollywood.

One of the intriguing new kids on the programming block goes by the title Beyond Boundaries. At Hahn Hall on July 2, July 25 and August 1, the new series showcases new music by living composers, alongside such staple adventurers as Tōru Takemitsu, György Ligeti, Max Bruch, and the birthday-caked Ravel.

No selective tour of the MAW season would be complete without mentioning the Denk factor. For several years, pianist and witty thinker Jeremy Denk has been one of the Academy’s best-known and most audience-beloved faculty members, who often brings his gifts to bear with special projects each summer. This year, he brings a special three-night survey of notable Beethoven sonatas in Hahn Hall, in the Beethoven Plus Series. No doubt, it will be another hot ticket. Denk delivers, and surprises.

As Bachhuber exclaimed to the preview audience, after Denk’s Beethovenian adventure, “You’ll leave these concerts listening differently.” The same promises to be true of MAW 2025 as a whole.

See musicacademy.org for details.