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Jacaranda is designed for newcomers, recording collectors, and edge-loving connoisseurs – listening with a sense of discovery and all the social benefits that only live concerts can provide. Jacaranda is a series of adventures – music from centuries past next to unforgettable new and modern music played by brilliant musicians. Each concert has a point of view and the series, as a whole, is rich with musical relationships that are satisfying on many levels. Jacaranda’s creators, Patrick Scott and Mark Alan Hilt, have an insightful way of programming music that lifts the concert experience to an exciting level. Jacaranda presents music mostly missing from the cultural life of Los Angeles in compelling performances that make you wonder why. This team brings to Jacaranda a broad and unexpected background. Their critically acclaimed approach has proven fresh and effective in re-imagining the concert-going experience with unusually informative program notes.
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Miriam Schulman, chair
ADVISORY COUNCIL
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Mark Alan Hilt, Music Director, is also director of the Harvard-Westlake School upper school orchestras program, and serves as music director for HW’s annual musical theatre production. Hilt is organist and director of music for First Pres Santa Monica, where he organized the Bach 2000 festival and Festival Messiaen in 2002. Both Bach and Messiaen are prominent in his mostly 20th century organ repertoire. Starting in his teens, Hilt has gained over 25 years experience as a keyboard player, choral director, recitalist, vocal coach and conductor. With five operas (including Carmen, Barber of Seville and Madame Butterfly) and a dozen musicals (including Company, Cabaret, and, Into the Woods) under his baton, Mr. Hilt’s experience is very diverse. As a benefit for Habitat of Humanity, he conducted the audacious Hebrew Requiem by Erich Zeisl. For Jacaranda he has conducted cantatas by Bach and Britten, Mozart’s “Gran Partita” Serenade, Schubert part-songs, Ives’ Unanswered Question, Stravinsky’s Mass, Octet and Three Japanese Lyrics, Gruber’s Frankenstein!!, Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs of a Mad King, Reich’s Eight Lines, and the world premiere of Jacaranda’s composer-sanctioned Suite from Einstein on the Beach by Glass. His recent performances of Boulez’s Memorial and Messiaen’s Colors of the Celestial City were hailed by the Los Angeles times as “stellar” with “bracing magnificence and sonic audacity…” Hilt is among Gloria Cheng’s favorite partners for piano four-hands. 