Laguna Beach Music Festival

Laguna Beach Music Festival

The Laguna Beach Music Festival is unique for the intimacy of its venues – with music salons filled to capacity at less than a hundred guests and concert halls where no patron is more than a dozen rows from the stage. The festival fosters meaningful connections between artist and audience and enhances music appreciation with informal discussions, mini-concerts, workshops, open rehearsals and social events. The 2012 festival, featuring distinguished performers comes to you from February 6th through 12th.

The festival is a project of Laguna Beach Live! and the Philharmonic Society of Orange County. Launched in 2003 with pianist Claude Frank as mentor artist and the young Calder Quartet as emerging artists, it has since grown to a full week of activities. This year’s Laguna Beach Music Festival honors the legacy of the late philanthropist and music lover Ed Halvajian.

Grammy Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell will serve as guest Artistic Director, partnering with composer-performer Edgar Meyer, the ever-surprising Calder Quartet and the youthful L.A.-based ensemble Calidore String Quartet, winners of the 2011 Fischoff Competition.

Joshua Bell has enchanted audiences worldwide with his breathtaking virtuosity and tone of rare beauty. In addition to numerous classical recordings, he has become a household name thanks to his many soundtracks including the Oscar-winning score for The Red Violin. His release, Romance of the Violin, was named the 2004 Billboard Classical CD of the Year. He has crossed musical borders to work with jazz, folk and traditional artists – notably with banjo wizard Sam Bush and guitarist Mike Marshall in Short Trip Home.

Equally lauded as classical virtuoso, concert music composer and American roots music wizard, Edgar Meyer owns the double bass and frequently works with musicians from diverse traditions like Bela Fleck, Zakir Hussain and others who are all masters of their form. An in-demand collaborator, audiences crossed over from multiple genres in droves to enjoy his Appalachia Waltz project with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and fiddler Mark O’Connor.

Winners of the 2009 ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award, the Calder Quartet has emerged as a leading American quartet with high-profile projects, prestigious commissions and unique collaborations to their credit. As comfortable, and as captivating, when performing with indie rock bands like Vampire Weekend and Airborne Toxic Event as in the concert hall, The Calder were featured as “emerging artists” in 2003 at the first-ever Laguna Beach Music Festival. Since then, they’ve spent time as graduate quartet in residence at The Juilliard School and have earned their way onto the shortlist of cool young quartets whose skill and technique is matched by depth of musical passion.

For more info visit
www.lagunabeachmusicfestival.com