ANNOUNCEMENT: For La Jolla Music Society’s Leah Rosenthal, new season is something to sing about
George Varga
July 19, 2020
La Jolla Music Society Artistic Director Leah Rosenthal has virtually no fear when it comes to putting together eight-month concert seasons, even during a global pandemic, or negotiating increasingly complex performance contracts. And she doesn’t flinch when dealing with the concert hall-sized egos of some guest artists or as she ambitiously expands the creative and stylistic parameters of one of San Diego’s oldest and most respected arts organizations.
But singing in public?
That’s another story for this New Jersey native, who gave birth to her second child last fall and started laying the foundation nearly two years ago for the society’s upcoming 2020-21 concert season at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla.
Never mind that Rosenthal, 40, earned a bachelor’s in vocal performance from Chicago’s Northeastern Illinois University in 2003. Never mind that she sang with opera companies in the Windy City, where she earned her master’s in Performing Arts Management at Columbia College five years later. And never mind that the weekly singing lessons she takes here every Saturday afternoon stretch back to 2008, when she was hired by the society as an artistic administrator.