Dimyana Pelev, starring as Eliza Doolittle in the Idyllwild Master Chorale’s concert version of “My Fair Lady.” Photo courtesy of Dimyana Pelev
It’s spring, Hill daffodils are beginning to emerge and dance in the warmth of the sun, and the Idyllwild Master Chorale is presenting a spring musical confection designed to inspire and entertain.

IMC Director Dwight “Buzz” Holmes reprises the successful pairing from last spring of classical and Broadway that played to standing room only audiences. This year it is “Mostly Mozart with a Fair Lady,” combining the musical brilliance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and a bit of Broadway in what critics have called the “perfect musical,” Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s hit-filled “My Fair Lady.”

Holmes opens the Saturday, March 30, concert with the music of Mozart, a naturally gifted composer who at the age of six was playing before royal audiences and composing pieces of extraordinary sophistication. By the time of his death at 35, Mozart had produced more than 600 works — symphonies, operas, concertos, quartets, cantatas — almost all of them of the most astonishing quality. Many regard him as the world’s greatest natural musical genius. His mature compositions are distinguished by their melodic beauty, formal elegance and richness of harmony and texture. Franz Joseph Haydn, in what now seems an underestimation, said of Mozart, “Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”

For “Mostly Mozart,” Holmes has programmed “Lacrymosa” (Day of Sadness) from Requiem, K. 626, “Regina Coeli,” and ”Laudate Dominum” from Mozart’s Vespers. And in a nod again to University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music Professor Morten Lauridsen, Holmes programmed “Dirait-on,” as lovely a piece of choral music as last IMC season’s “O Magnum Mysterium.” Musicologist and conductor Nick Strimple said of Lauridsen in his book “Choral Music of the Twentieth Century,” “Lauridsen is the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, [whose] probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered.” In 2006, Lauridsen was named an “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2007 he received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony. The award is the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the U.S. government.

“My Fair Lady,” Lerner and Loewe’s musical treatment of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” opened on Broadway in 1956 and set the record at that time for the longest running musical. Rex Harrison starred as the acerbic phoneticist Professor Henry Higgins who wagers he can turn a common Cockney flower seller, Eliza Doolittle, played by Julie Andrews, into a lady accepted in the finest social circles. Tuneful, plucky and great fun, “My Fair Lady”’s engaging score features “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “With a Little Bit of Luck,” “The Rain in Spain,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Dimyana Pelev, last year’s Guinevere in “Camelot,” and Marshall Smith, “Camelot”’s Arthur head the Fair Lady cast as Eliza and Higgins.

“Mostly Mozart and a Fair Lady” plays for one night only, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 30 at Stephens Hall on the Idyllwild Arts campus. Tickets, $20 for adults and $10 for students, are available at the door and online at www.idyllwildmasterchorale.com.