Looking Up and Ahead at Mount Wilson's 2025 Season

Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome: 

The Upcoming Summer 2025 Season

DAVID J. BROWN

For the eighth season in nine years (2020 was, as we all know, essentially canceled as far as live music and other performing arts were concerned due to Covid), the remarkable acoustics of the Dome that houses the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory will in summer 2025 resound to music performed by world-class players from Southern California and beyond, adding as in recent years jazz to the previous classical-only repertoire.

Indeed, this will be the most ambitious season yet of Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome, reflecting the remarkable success of an enterprise triggered back in 2017 by the request from Mount Wilson Institute Trustee Dan Kohne, now the Observatory’s Chief Operating Officer, to Cécilia Tsan (Principal Cellist of Long Beach Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Master Chorale) to test the Dome’s acoustics (right).

The result left no doubt as to their unique beauty, resonance, and impact, as many thousands have enjoyed hearing from the brief video she posted on Facebook.

The first concert was given on Sunday, July 2017 by Cécilia Tsan and the late Ben Powell (see below) and was reviewed here on LA Opus. So successful was it that a second concert was scheduled and given two months later (also reviewed here)—and the die was cast for full seasons in the year following and subsequently, with Ms. Tsan as Artistic Director, a role that she has fulfilled ever since.

Now for 2025 she has upped the total from the previous years’ one concert per month, from May through to October, to nine in all—on the Sunday afternoons of May 25, June 29, July 20, August 3, 17 and 31, September 21, and October 5 and 19—but in each case the timing and format remain as originally established eight years ago: the same one-hour-plus program performed twice, at 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., with wine and light refreshments served outside in the time between and included in the ticket price of $60.

THE 2025 SEASON

The season kicks off on May 25 with “Carte Blanche,” a jazz program from Peter Erskine & the Lounge Art Ensemble (Peter Erskine (left), drums, Bob Sheppard, saxophone, Darek Oles, bass). The repertoire will be announced from the stage. Erskine has been voted “Best Jazz Drummer of the Year” 10 times by the readers of Modern Drummer magazine, while Sheppard is a professor of jazz studies at USC and can be heard on the soundtracks of major motion pictures and recordings. Darek Oles, a native of Poland, has performed with many major jazz artists such as Pat Metheny, Bennie Maupin, Peter Erskine, Alan Pasqua, etc.

On June 29, under the title “Cellissimo,” the two cellist friends Cécilia Tsan and Allan Hon will play an eclectic program that includes a world premiere, Ready to Rumble (2024) by the Austrian-born, LA-resident composer Gernot Wolfgang (b. 1957, right), an arrangement of the celebrated Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004, a Barrière Sonata, and an Offenbach duet.

July 20 brings perhaps the stand-out event of the season. To celebrate the 56th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s first walk on the Moon, astronaut-violinist Sarah Gillis joins Martin Chalifour (violin), Andrew Duckles (viola), Cécilia Tsan (cello), and Tim Durkovic (piano) to play Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op.44.

Sarah Gillis flew to space in September 2024 on Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission, where she played John Williams’ "Rey's Theme" from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (click here or on the image above). For this concert—with John Williams' blessing—Gillis will play the violin and piano version of that piece especially for the Mount Wilson music series. The program will also include Beethoven’s Piano Trio No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 11. This will also be the first time in MWO’s concert series that chamber music with piano has been included.

On August 3, the Zelter String Quartet (Kyle Gilner and Gallia Kastner (violins), Carson Rick (viola), and Allan Hon (cello)) return by popular demand, with a fascinating program that pairs music from the 19th and 21st centuries. This acclaimed ensemble of youthful musicians will give the world premiere of City of Angels (2024), a three-movement homage to his home city of Los Angeles by Todd Mason (b. 1957, left), together with the first of Beethoven's celebrated "late quartets," his String Quartet No. 12 in E-flat major, Op. 127, composed in 1825.

As noted above, in the very first Mount Wilson concert in July 2017 Cécilia Tsan was partnered by violinist Ben Powell (right). Ben Powell died in October 2024, one day after his 38th birthday, and in “Celebrating Ben Powell” on August 17, Cécilia Tsan will be joined by Leah Zeger (violin and vocals), Zach Dellinger (viola), Roch Lockyer (guitar and vocals), and Brian Netzley (bass). Cécilia Tsan writes: “As Ben’s friends, we will perform music from various genres, honoring his exceptional versatility on the violin and his beautiful soul.”

August 31: Leelou and Friends. Leelou is a young vocalist (and cellist) from Paris who was in the finals of the French reality singing competition The Voice: La plus belle voix in 2017 at the age of 11. Leelou graduated two years ago from the Pau Conservatory, and has been touring as Nefertari (left) in the French musical Les Dix Commandements in Europe. At Mount Wilson she, together with her friends Tony Bredelet (vocals and guitar), and Arnaud Dunoyer (keyboard), will offer a variety of songs featuring the various genres that she loves.

On September 21 the 2025 Mount Wilson season turns to strictly classical repertoire when the New Hollywood String Quartet (below, l-r: Tereza Stanislav (violin), Andrew Shulman (cello), Rafael Rishik (violin), Robert Brophy (viola)) offer an all-Schubert program. They will open with the String Quartet No. 12 “Quartettsatz” in C minor, D. 703 (1820) and then will be joined by Cécilia Tsan as second cellist to perform what is arguably the very pinnacle of Schubert’s astonishing final year of composition and, tragically, his life—the String Quintet in C major, D. 956, which he completed only two months before his death in November 1828 at the age of 31.

October 5: Musical Friends. Roger Wilkie (violin), Jonah Sirota (viola), Cécilia Tsan (cello), Geoff Osika (bass), Gigi Brady (oboe), and Sergio Coelho (clarinet) will present a winds and strings celebration.

This program of 20th century music, curated by Jonah Sirota, will include works by Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, and most intriguingly Hans Gál OBE (right), the Jewish/Austrian composer, pedagogue, musicologist, and author who fled the Nazis to the UK in 1938 and stayed there for the rest of his very long life (1890-1987).

Finally, on October 19 the Dome will resound to Mexican rhythms, tunes and timbres when it hosts Mariachi Lindas Mexicanas, LA’s all-female mariachi band, which was founded in Boyle Heights, California in 2007 by musical director Maricela Martínez (left), a musician with more than 20 years of experience in the mariachi business. “The goal of Mariachi Lindas Mexicanas is to share this tradition with younger generations around the world."

After its construction during World War 1 and “first light” in November 1917 for the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, major astronomical discoveries made the Dome a uniquely significant temple to science during the first half of the 20th century: now, with acoustics that rival the great cathedrals of Europe, in the 21st century it has become an equally unique concert venue. If this brief preview of the 2025 Sunday Afternoon Concerts in the Dome has whetted your appetite, tickets for all the above concerts are available now from the Mount Wilson Observatory website—enjoy!

---ooo---

Images: Dome exterior: Todd Mason; Cécilia Tsan: Facebook; Peter Erskine: artist website; Gernot Wolfgang: composer website; Sarah Gillis: YouTube; Todd Mason: composer website; Ben Powell: Summit records; Leelou: Facebook; New Hollywood String Quartet: artists' website; Hans Gál: The Well-Tempered Ear; Dome interior: Irina Logra, courtesy Mount Wilson Observatory; Maricela Martínez: Alliance for California Traditional Arts.