Da Camera Society to Stage Chamber Concerts

The Da Camera Society of Los Angeles will return to Orange County during its 1988-89 chamber music season with a “Springtime in Historic Orange County Mini-Festival,” to take place March 19, producing director MaryAnn Bonino announced this week.

The Los Angeles Guitar Quartet will play at the Santa Ana Courthouse, and an evening concert will feature Hispanic music by I Cantori at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah on Bush Street in Santa Ana.

The society will also produce a mini-festival in downtown Riverside, in connection with the opening of the Omni Mission Inn in February, featuring the Franciscan String Quartet and the male vocal ensemble, Chanticleer.

The society’s regular season, beginning Oct. 7, will consist of more than 50 chamber-music concerts in Los Angeles, including a ninth series of Chamber Music in Historic Sites programs.

Of 31 concert locales, 17 will be new for the society, including private homes by Greene & Greene, Wallace Neff and Cedric Gibbons, and landmark ballrooms, lobbies, private clubs, and churches by John Parkinson, John C. Austin, Myron Hunt, Arthur Benton and Morgan, Walls & Clements.

Ensembles making their Los Angeles debuts as part of the season will be the Chicago Symphony Chamber Ensemble, the Festival Winds and Brass from New York, the Trio d’Amsterdam, the John Gibbons Ensemble, the Ames Piano Quartet, the Smithson Quartet and, from London and Paris, John Holloway and Davitt Moroney.

Other visiting ensembles will include the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra from Hungary, the Tokyo String Quartet, I Fiamminghi from Belgium, the Haydn Trio from Vienna, the Fresk Quartet from Sweden, and the Panocha and Talich quartets from Czechoslovakia.

In November, a Baroque Discotheque will take place in Hollywood to raise funds for the Da Camera Society’s outreach program. In December, Iona Brown and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will perform a Christmas concert at the Doheny Mansion on the downtown Los Angeles campus of Mount St. Mary’s College.

The season will conclude with the third Catalina Festival of Chamber Music, June 2-4.

For information, call (213) 747-9085.