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The Arts Intel Report

Beethoven by the Bay

Conductor Marie Jacquot.

July 13, 2025

Beethoven’s stirring Coriolan overture, op. 62, opens the program. It closes with his beloved Symphony No. 6 in F major, “Pastoral,” op. 68, which evokes a day in the country all the more perfect for the thunderstorm. In between, comes the magic-carpet ride that is Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64. These priceless old chestnuts are in the hands of two exciting talents new to the San Diego concert public. The conductor is Marie Jacquot, a former trombonist and junior-division French Open tennis competitor whose portfolio now includes major symphonic and operatic positions in European music capitals. The soloist is Clara-Jumi Kang, who took up the violin at age three, notched her concerto debut in Hamburg at five, and went on to score a monarch’s ransom of glittering international prizes. Kang’s parents are opera singers, which may in part account for her spiky dramatic temperament. For a preview, check out her early recital album Modern Solo (Decca 2011), and zero right in on the fierce arrangement of Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig. That’s the nightmare ballad of a father and his delirious son galloping through the night, pursued by a relentless pedophile spook. Like Goethe’s poem and Schubert’s setting, the transcription is quite the tour de force. I wonder—does Kang take encore requests? —Matthew Gurewitsch