UCLA Plans Second Nakamichi Festival

The UCLA Department of Music, with major funding from the E. Nakamichi Foundation, will present a second Baroque Music Festival--designed along the lines of its 1986 festival--on the Westwood campus, June 22-26.

Announced Wednesday, the five-day festival will “celebrate the musical and artistic achievement of 17th-Century Rome” in concerts, recitals, panel discussions, workshops, a special early-music exhibition and the first fully staged performances in this country of Stefano Landi’s opera, “Sant’ Alessio.”

The festival will open June 22 at 8 p.m. in Royce Hall with a performance by the baroque ensemble, “Les Sonatistes” (formerly “Les gouts reunis”), featuring Stanley Ritchie and Daniel Stepner, baroque violins; Elizabeth Wright, harpsichord, and Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba.

Conducted by Nicholas McGegan and staged by McGegan and choreographer Catherine Turocy, Landi’s 1632 opera will be performed three times, June 23-25, in Schoenberg Hall Auditorium.

The cast will feature Turocy’s New York Baroque Dance Company and singers Judith Nelson, David Thomas, Julianne Baird, Drew Minter, Frank Kelley and Jeffrey Thomas, as well as the vocal ensemble, I Cantori, directed by Edward Cansino. The sets will be designed by Scott Blake and the costumes by Bonnie Kruger--both after the production mounted in Rome in 1634. David Kruger will supervise the reproduction of lighting effects used on 17th-Century stages.

The festival will close, June 26 at 2:30 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall, with a gala concert of sacred music based on 17th-Century Roman oratorios, featuring countertenor Drew Minter.

Morning panel discussions will be held in Ackerman Union from 9 to 11 a.m. A workshop on baroque instruments is scheduled at 9 a.m., June 25. In addition, three noon concerts, June 23-25, will be given by lutenist Paul O’Dette and organist Yuko Hayashi, among others.

A major exhibition of early-music books, records and instruments, fashioned by contemporary North American makers, will be on display in the Ackerman Union Grand Ballroom. As part of the exhibition, a series of recitals organized by UCLA harpsichordist Bess Karp will spotlight Los Angeles early-music performers.

The festival, sponsored by a $295,000 grant from the E. Nakamichi Foundation, will be administered by general director Frederick Hammond and festival committee chairman Thomas Harmon, both UCLA professors of music, with consultants MaryAnn Bonino and Howard Schott.

Information: (213) 825-6823 or (213) 825-4761.