Thursday, July 16, 2026

Catch the Country’s Best Before They Bolt

[photo credit: Camerata Pacifica]

Meet the ensemble Adrian Spence founded in 1990, back when he was a 25-year-old flautist with a Brandenburg obsession and — no, really — over 2,000 logged skydives. Thirty-six seasons later, his group calls Rothenberg Hall at the Huntington its San Marino home, and only two dates remain this year. October 13 brings Rachmaninoff’s Chopin variations and Schubert’s B-flat trio, played by Naumburg winner Grace Park and company. November 10 goes bolder: Mazzoli, Mozart’s wind quintet, and a world premiere from Niloufar Nourbakhsh.

Here’s what separates Camerata Pacifica from the usual chamber outfit: Spence handpicks every musician, then drills each program through a week-long residency before playing it across four cities. His stated aim is to “treat intelligent people intelligently” — which in practice means core repertoire seated right next to the unfamiliar, all of it dressed in the video, projection, and theatrical lighting the group calls “high definition chamber music.” He commissioned Jake Heggie and Huang Ruo long before their big breaks — a batting average most presenters would kill for. The sound has traveled to Hong Kong, the Library of Congress, the Morgan Library, and halls in London, Dublin, and Belfast, and now it lands twenty minutes from the Rose Bowl.

Then there’s the Nightingale Channel, the reason a trophy has the group’s name on it. Born in 2020 and built out with UCLA Health, it streams curated concert video into hospital rooms, infusion centers, and dialysis units — free to the hospitals, and now running everywhere from City of Hope to Loma Linda. It has raised nearly two million dollars, and CMA’s citation singled it out as visionary. Delight and decency in one ensemble; take the win.

The talent on these two nights is not filler. October leans on Grace Park, an LA kid who started at five and trained at Colburn, alongside Bogotá-born cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia, a BBC New Generation Artist, with Estonian keyboard force Irina Zahharenkova at the piano. November hands Daugherty’s Firecracker to Nicholas Daniel — that’s Nicholas Daniel, OBE — and threads the evening from a boisterous piece by the late Sarah Gibson, through Nourbakhsh’s brand-new octet, to Mozart’s sunlit wind quintet. Two very different Tuesdays, one very good reason to clear your calendar.

The room seats 374, the parking’s free, and the Metro A Line drops you at Allen Station. Do the math on how fast that fills.

Book the moment tickets drop — this is a room, not a stadium.

Rothenberg Hall, The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; Oct. 13 & Nov. 10, 7:30 p.m.; cameratapacifica.org, (805) 884-8410; Nov. 10 tickets approx. $75–$85, Oct. 13.