Thank you for coming last weekend as our largest 2-concert audience since UP CLOSE AND CLASSICAL concerts started in 2023! Look how happy you made our musicians…

Now, remember, we barely started our 2025-26 season, and we have much more music coming… Always with free admission! Please mark your calendars :

On January 31st and February 1st 2026, the principal oboist of the Long Beach Symphony, Rong-Huey Liu, will join our string players to explore two great musical periods for oboe music. Mozart and Druschetzky were contemporaries and offer two perspectives: one from Salzburg and Vienna, the other in what is now Budapest. Our concert will feature another pair: Benjamin Britten and Jack Moeran were both part of the renewal of chamber music in the British Isles in the early 20th century, both composing in the popular form of a “Fantasy”, yet with very different personalities.

Then on February 28th and March 1st 2026, Rong-Huey will return with the amazing collaborative pianist Vivian Liu, who is also her sister, to travel through space and time, starting with Germany in the romantic 1850’s, and Clara Schuman, then visiting the early 20th century Leipzig and Gustav Schreck, JS Bach’s successor at St Thomas’ church, to return to England in the mid-20th century when Hamilton Harty was conducting and composing. Finally, the Uruguayan-American composer Miguel del Aguila will show us that great classical music is still composed here and now.

On March 28, 29 and 30th, our string quartet will return for what we hope will become again a Holy Week tradition: the Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross by Joseph Haydn. Chamber music is wordless music, but not meaningless. The choice made by Haydn to not voice the words, but rather extract the beautiful music they contain, gives us a masterpiece of chamber music. Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” was very popular for many years in many countries. Maybe will its popularity return in Southern California after more people have an opportunity to experience it…?