California’s Mainly Mozart Festival built a new stage and infrastructure for its 2021 concerts in Del Mar, drawing the biggest audiences in the organization’s history. Photo: Ken Jacques
“Something altogether unexpected happened at the 2021 edition of Mainly Mozart’s all-outdoors All-Star Orchestra Festival at Del Mar Surf Cup Sports Park, which was held in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic,” writes George Varga in Sunday’s (1/30) San Diego Union-Tribune. “Attendance reached an all-time high of 1,500 to 1,600 per concert, doubling the event’s pre-pandemic nightly norm at the indoor Balboa Theatre in downtown San Diego. Equally unexpected, 60 percent of the event’s 2021 audience had never been to a Mainly Mozart performance before…. Mainly Mozart will hold the 2022 edition of its All-Star Orchestra Festival season entirely outdoors … [said] Mainly Mozart CEO and co-founder Nancy Laturno.… The San Diego nonprofit … will return … for festival concerts in June and October…. With the pandemic upending business as usual for all of the arts, Mainly Mozart shifted from … traditional marketing … to social media…. Mainly Mozart held four ‘Ask Me Anything’ Q&A sessions on Reddit last year…. The results were remarkable, [Director of External Communications] Mark Laturno [said]…. ‘We saw big spikes in ticket sales after each Reddit session.’ ”
