Pianist Romero to Be Featured at Mozart Festival

Pianist Gustavo Romero will be a featured soloist in this year’s Mainly Mozart Festival at the Old Globe Theatre, May 31-June 9, the festival’s music director, David Atherton, announced Thursday.

The former music director of the San Diego Symphony (1980-87), who now holds a similar post with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, re-entered the local musical scene last year with a 10-day chamber orchestra festival at the Old Globe’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre.

The British maestro said this year’s programming will follow last year’s inaugural model, with four outdoor orchestral programs under his baton. Each orchestra concert will be repeated the following evening. In addition, the single chamber music program, with Romero, a San Diego native, playing Mozart’s Piano and Wind Quintet, will be moved to one of the Globe’s indoor theaters.

The opening concert will feature festival concertmaster William Preucil, first violinist of the Cleveland String Quartet, in Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto. The June 3 program will present Romero in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 as well as violist Cynthia Phelps in the rarely performed “Fantasia on a Theme by Mozart” by Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a pupil of Mozart.

Cellist Ronald Thomas will perform Tchaikovsky’s “Variations on a Rococo Theme” and Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise” on June 6. On the festival’s closing concert, Pittsburgh Symphony principal bassoonist Nancy Goeres will solo in Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto.

According to festival manager Nancy Laturno, the $420,000 project has received $15,000 in advance ticket sales and significant underwriting, including housing and rehearsal space from downtown San Diego’s Kingston Hotel. She also said the festival finished its first year in the black, averaging 80% nightly attendance.