Beethoven, Sibelius, and Puccini top 2022-2023 San Diego Season

With the Mainly Mozart Festival now over, the 2022-2023 season has come to an end. It is possible to view Mainly Mozart as the beginning of the summer festival season, which is fair, but to my mind, it is the big finish. There were some great moments in the 2022-2023 season. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

I went to two San Diego Symphony concerts at The California Center for the Arts Escondido. Both were excellent. This first featured Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. It is the new standard by which I will compare all future Brahms Firsts. Rafael Payare was in particularly good form. In the famous final movement, Payare was exuding so much energy that I thought he might start levitating.

The second concert was anchored by Jean Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2. Finnish conductor Tarmo Peltokoski made his U.S. debut with a resounding victory. When the big theme came back in the final movement, it was a moment I’ll never forget. My top five concert experiences now stands at at least 11 but at the time I was convinced this was a legitimate top-five moment.

With its production of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, the San Diego Opera proved itself to be willing and able to present traditional opera this powerful and tasteful. Very few things turn me off more than opera productions that have been updated for modern audiences.

I’ve seen a few that do work such as Willy Decker’s “Big Clock” La Traviata and the Barenboim Ring Cycle from Bayreuth circa 1991. However, on the whole, I find updated productions to be misguided and lazy. They appear as clever, often not so clever, ideas as opposed to organic developments of the operatic tradition. San Diego Opera’s Tosca was well-produced, well-conceived, and, most importantly, well-sung.

Of course, The Mainly Mozart Festival provided a few great moments. The performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and the closing night performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 are also vying for a spot in my top five. The Beethoven Ninth is probably in there. My own personal five-fetish aside, I cannot imagine a better Beethoven Nine.

Mainly Mozart owns a few things in the mind. The Beethoven Ninth is simply the most recent. Mainly Mozart also owns Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1, Ralph Vaughan William’s The Wasps Overture, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8, to name a few.