Camarada's 'Unstoppable' 26th season will feature six livestreamed concerts and array of genres

Beth Ross Buckley is the flutist and co-artistic director of San Diego's 26-year-old Camarada.

The chamber-music-and-beyond group will feature music by Beethoven, Stevie Wonder, Astor Piazzolla, The Beatles and more

San Diego Union-Tribune

Sept. 7, 2020 3:43 PM PT

The coronavirus pandemic has prompted arts organizations in San Diego and across the nation to cancel their fall and winter seasons, but not Camarada. The enterprising chamber-music-and-beyond group will celebrate its 26th anniversary by releasing a new album of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” and pivoting to six online concerts that will be livestreamed from the La Jolla Music Society’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall.

Camarada’s reimagined new season, billed as “Unstoppable,” will launch Nov. 1 with “Recuerdos de los Dias” (“Memory of the Days”), a Day of the Dead-themed concert showcasing such Latin-American composers as Andres Martin, Michael Ponce and Miguel de Aguilla.

The season will conclude May 15 with the world premiere of Andres Martin’s “Unstoppable,” a trio for flute, violin and bass, along with pieces by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Madeleine Dring and Argentinian nuevo tango pioneer Astor Piazzolla.

These will bookend concerts in December, January, February and April that will feature the music of such diverse artists as Beethoven, Stevie Wonder, Vivaldi, The Beatles, Ennio Morricone, Raul Jaurena, Henry Purcell and more. Guest performers will include guitarist Peter Sprague and singer Rebecca Jade — both multiple San Diego Music Award-winners — and San Diego Symphony trumpeter Jeff Nevin, one of the nation’s foremost Mariachi music educators.

“We’ve been working nonstop to envision a new way to present our series this year and it’s all coming together,” said flutist Beth Ross Buckley, who is Camarada’s co-founder and co-artistic director. “We also have been performing a very intimate La Jolla Patio Series. To be socially distant and outside, we could only sell 14 tickets, which sold out in a day.”

Tickets for Camarada’s “Unstoppable” season are priced at $20 for each of the six livestreamed concerts, or $120 for a season pass. A $195 package, which includes a $75 donation, is also available at camarada.org.

— George Varga is a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”