MENDOCINO CO. 7/18/26 — Mendocino Music Festival Artistic Director Allan Pollack says there was a real need for such an event when he and festival cofounders pitched its first tent in 1987.
“At the time, professional musicians seemed to be a bit disgruntled with the scene and the tension of being in these professional orchestras, and we wanted to create an environment in which they could come up, be musicians and pay attention to the music,” Pollack recalls. “And it’s spectacularly beautiful up here. We put up a small tent on the edge of Pacific Ocean, and we had eight concerts — four orchestral concerts, four chamber music concerts. That was the first year, and it was a huge success.”
The festival’s iconic white — albeit now much bigger — Tent Concert Hall is the primary venue for nearly 30 concerts in this, its 40th anniversary season, which continues through July 25. The festival, which has its own resident orchestra, also hosts a diverse mix of genres ranging from rock to jazz to international to classical. Only about half of its audience comes from Mendocino County.
“We had a lot of interest in music in this area and we had no idea that we would end up attracting so many people over the years,” says pianist and associate artistic director Susan Waterfall, who along with Pollack — they are married — and the late former San Francisco Symphony principal bassoonist Walter Green founded the festival.
With next year marking the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, the Mendocino Music Festival, like many performing arts organizations, is making the titan of composition a centerpiece of their programming with 17 different orchestral, chamber and solo piano works. But the 40th anniversary of the festival gave its curators an additional rationale for focusing on Beethoven.
“All of our composers have been great composers, but we chose the greatest, possibly, of them all for the 40th anniversary,” Waterfall says. He was living in the era of Napoleon and coming out of the time of Mozart and Haydn, and sort of singlehandedly, with his own inwardness and emotional qualities, he brings on the Romantic era in music. Also, just because of the state of the world today, we need Beethoven, we need his optimism and compassion.”
Getting to know the artists
Waterfall shares a lot of her knowledge about music and musicians through her popular, free biographical films festivalgoers can view on YouTube.
“In an hour and a half’s time you get an overview of a composer’s life and times, and I use excerpts of the major compositions by that composer and talk about the development of his art,” Waterfall explains. “You really start getting a feeling for these people, especially because I always bring up a lot of gossip.”
Other highlights this season include: the guitar-violin duo of William Coulter and Edwin Huizinga known as Fire & Grace; Los Angeles-based Calder Quartet, jazz musician (and Pollack and Waterfall’s son) Julian Waterfall Pollack; San Francisco piano duo Sarah Cahill and Regina Meyers; half-century-old Cajun music quartet BeauSoleil; the Festival Orchestra with conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong and violinist Mio Imai; multi-award-winning blues guitarist Sue Foley and the annual Emerging Artists Recital on July 24.
The recital showcases young musicians in their teens or early twenties who participated in the Emerging Artist Program, in which they receive a stipend, mentorship, and appear onstage in recital on the festival’s penultimate day.
“They’re spectacular players, so spectacular that even some of the pros look back and say, ‘Oh, my God, who’s that?’” Pollack says. “We have chamber music coaching for them, so some of the better players prepare pieces and coach them. It’s always a wonderful experience to see these young kids playing so beautifully — they’re here for almost three weeks and it’s an intense experience for them — and the concert is very well-attended.”
Pollack, a composer and jazz musician, says that his and Waterfall’s backgrounds in genres other than Western classical — Waterfall studied Indian classical music — spurred their interest in diversifying festival programming.
“When we were young, we had quite eclectic tastes and we decided this is going to be an eclectic music festival,” he says. “Whatever we love, we’re going to put on, and it has ended up being just about every kind of music there is.”
Lively social scene in a pop-up venue
The Tent Concert Hall, which is erected in June and taken down soon after the festival ends, is the focal point for more than performance; it’s also the home of a lively social scene.
“You can see the silhouettes of birds flying over it, the lighting is really beautiful, and it’s right on the edge of the ocean, so people are standing out on this beautiful mowed lawn looking out at the ocean,” Waterfall says. “When we thought, well, maybe we shouldn’t have a tent because it’s expensive, people reacted negatively and said, ‘You have to have the tent!’ During the intermission or before the concerts everybody mingles, there’s wine and cookies.”
The tent has also been the setting for the festival’s most memorable surprises.
“One year, there was a rainstorm — who gets a rainstorm on the North Coast in the summer? — there was a puddle that gathered on the tent roof and the festival president was crawling on top trying to get the water off,” Waterfall recounts. “And there can be wind on the Mendocino coast, so that’s been sometimes like playing a piano concerto on the Titanic.”
The festival also stages opera; this year it’s Puccini’s “La Bohème.” Pollack says a production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” he conducted in 2014 was the subject of another memorable surprise in the tent, when a town alarm went off right in the middle of the banquet scene.
Pollack says, “Don Giovanni, turkey leg in his hand, was supposed to be eating it, and the fire alarm went off. He just kept eating that turkey, and then the fire alarm went off for a while, and then came back on again.”
Whatever the unexpected weather or circumstances, Pollack says the Mendocino Music Festival and the ensemble he leads will continue in their mission of presenting excellent programming.
“We have an entirely professional orchestra with principal players from a lot of the great orchestras and we have some of the best musicians coming up here,” he says. “We’re humble enough that we cannot afford a million or two million for the Rolling Stones, but we find groups and musicians that are spectacular and are either on their way up or on their way down.”
The Mendocino Music Festival runs through July 25 with its main venue the Tent Concert Hall at 45035 Main St., as well as Preston Hall at 44867 Main St. and the Mendocino Presbyterian Church at 44831 Main St., Mendocino. Tickets are $15 to $125 at mendocinomusic.org.