Summer with Stuart Concert Series
About this Event
Join us for the second annual Summer with Stuart, a pop-up concert series at various Stuart Collection Artworks. In partnership with local chamber musicians, we're presenting six weeks of free, family-friendly summer evening programming.
Thursdays, 6 - 7 pm
July 2: Sun God, Series kickoff with Westwind Brass
As America marks its 250th birthday, Westwind Brass celebrates with Sousa-style marches, beloved folk and hymn tunes, jazz standards, Broadway showstoppers, and Hollywood film scores, all carried unamplified across Niki de Saint Phalle’s radiant Sun God lawn. The professional brass quintet — two trumpets, French horn, trombone, and tuba — sweeps across the American story, from the concert hall to the silver screen. Think Copland’s wide-open prairie sound and the brassy swagger of big-band jazz. Roughly 60–75 minutes of joyful noise for America’s 250th.
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Check out the band in advance: Listen to Westwind Brass
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Location: Sun God in Google Maps
July 9: La Jolla Project, Left Coast Quintet
As dusk settles over the Richard Fleischner’s La Jolla Project, five wind players gather among UC San Diego’s popular outdoor artwork, known as “Stonehenge,” for an evening that spans centuries in a single breath. The Left Coast Quintet — flute, oboe, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon — is one of music’s most eloquent ensembles: five distinct voices, one rich palette of color. Their program moves fluidly from Baroque counterpoint and Classical-era works (the woodwind quintet was born in Mozart’s day) to Romantic showpieces, contemporary discoveries, and imaginative arrangements of jazz and film music. What sets LCQ apart is its blend of warmth, humor, and polish — as at home with a Baroque partita as a film-score medley, and always ready to let the audience in on the fun. About 60 minutes where art, landscape, and music fold into one another.
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Check out the band in advance: Listen to Left Coast Quintet on their website
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Location: La Jolla Project in Google Maps
July 16: Bear, Westwind Virtuosi
Westwind Virtuosi returns to the most intimate setting in the series — the Bear courtyard, centered on Tim Hawkinson's massive granite boulder, Bear, also known as "Beryl." Something happens when strings play beside that stone: the granite seems to lean in and listen, holding the sound warm and close. This chamber ensemble — violin, viola, cello, and bass — draws on the heart of the string repertoire, from Haydn and Mozart through the Romantics, favoring lyrical slow movements that reward close listening: the cello’s deep warmth, the violin’s singing upper register, the feel of private conversation between musicians. Expect folk songs, tango, and lighter classics that translate beautifully to strings in the open air.
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Check out the band in advance: Listed to Westwind Virtuosi on their website
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Location: Bear in Google Maps
July 23: Sun God, Manny Cepeda + Westwind Strings & Brass
We’ve never done this before — and that’s exactly the point: For one electrifying hour, strings, brass, and the irresistible Manny Cepeda come together for a brand-new program of salsa, rhythm, and pure Latin joy. Sábor means flavor, and this concert has it in abundance. Cepeda — one of San Diego’s most beloved Latin musicians — leads a combined ensemble of Westwind string and brass players through salsa, cumbia, bolero, and cha-cha: forms rooted in Cuba, Colombia, and Puerto Rico and built on syncopated rhythm and call-and-response. The strings, unusual in a Latin dance band, lend lush warmth beneath the brass’s punch and swagger — the full sound of the great Tito Puente–era orchestras. The Sun God lawn's open footprint gives the music room to move.
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Check out the band in advance: Listen to Manny Cepeda on his website
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Location: Sun God in Google Maps
July 30: La Jolla Project, Hornswoggle
Thirty French horns gather at dusk at the La Jolla Project— and the results are elemental. Hornswoggle is one of the few ensembles in the country performing at this scale, and the French horn genuinely sounds better outdoors than in any hall. Thirty players spread across the grounds, dispersing the sound so it surrounds you rather than faces you — hunting calls and fanfares dating to the 17th and 18th centuries, hymn-like chorales and folk songs that bloom across horns in unison, and contemporary works written for the spatial possibilities of many horns in open air. Against the backdrop of La Jolla Project, it becomes a glorious, soaring wall of brass rolling into the sky.
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Check out the band in advance: Listen to Hornswoggle on their website
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Location: La Jolla Project in Google Maps
August 6: Bear, Chamber Orchestra
The Second Summer with Stuart ends the only way it could — with everyone on stage, Handel in the air, and Bear hearing Water Music for the very first time. Handel wrote Water Music in 1717 to be played outdoors, from a barge on the River Thames for King George I — one of the earliest masterpieces written for the open air. Three hundred years later, the combined forces of our summer series bring it back where it belongs: beside Tim Hawkinson’s granite boulder Bear, under a summer sky. Roughly twenty musicians — strings, brass, and winds drawn from every ensemble of the season, many of them former San Diego Chamber Orchestra players — gather for the full sweep of Handel’s suites: stately overtures, graceful minuets, and spirited hornpipes.
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Location: Bear in Google Maps
Summer with Stuart Concert Series Sharable Flyer for Printing (Google Doc)
The Stuart Collection at the University of California, San Diego – comprised of 22 permanent artworks by world-renowned artists, and growing – aims to question conventional understandings of public art in playful and insightful ways through our commissioning programs, and seeks to enrich the cultural, intellectual, and scholarly life of the UC San Diego campus and local San Diego community. We enhance public life through art that encourages thoughtful deliberation, an awareness of difference, mental and physical wellbeing, and that inspires creative solutions to complex issues; and continue to commission exciting new works from the world’s most important contemporary artists through our Landmarks, Emerging Artists and Public Programs.