As the Batiquitos Festival struggles to keep...

As the Batiquitos Festival struggles to keep afloat, two of the pops concerts at the outdoor Sammis Pavilion have been dropped from the schedule. Tonight’s scheduled orchestra concert, “Vienna, City of Dreams,” has been canceled, but Saturday’s all-Mozart program, under the baton of Henry Temianka, will be played at 7 p.m., according to Bertram Turetzky, dean of the Batiquitos Festival Institute. In place of Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante” with violist Joseph de Pasquale and violinist Irina Tseitlin, Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto will be performed with Tseitlin in the solo role. A similar reduction of next weekend’s programming was announced, canceling the July 22 pops offering, but retaining the July 23 program of opera arias with orchestra. Michel Barton, assistant to the festival’s primary patron Donald Sammis, explained that canceling the two concerts would help the cash-strapped festival board survive through festival’s final event July 23.