MUSIC REVIEW : SUMMER FEST ’86 OPENS AT LA JOLLA’S SHERWOOD

With a long and varied history of activity to its credit, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society introduced a new format for Summer Fest ’86 before a large and stylish audience Friday night in Sherwood Auditorium. The series of eight summer music concerts is planned to extend over two weekends.

Rather than importing established organizations, the present scheme is to form mixed ensembles of resident and non-resident musicians under the general direction of Heiichiro Ohyama, principal violist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It is not a system designed to supply the most polished perfection, but the opening event proved that it can produce stimulating performances with no loss of professional standards. It also allows for flexibility in assembling programs of less than hackneyed material while preserving well-considered contrasts and balances.

The point was illustrated nicely when the concert opened with Faure’s once widely popular but now seldom heard Piano Quartet No. 1 in C Minor, Opus 45. French music has fallen on slender times with current audiences and no better example could have been found to restore the fading glories of the style. Faure was a master of an intensely personal gift channeled through the unmistakable manner of French tradition. It is a style based on restraint and reticence, a polite style that can still suggest surging emotional impulses below the well-mannered surface.

The ensemble uncovered the subtleties of the music at no sacrifice of its vitality. The deftly nuanced and clearly articulated piano playing of David Golub became the focal point for warm and expert string playing by Gyorgy Pauk, violin; Ohyama, viola; and Matt Haimovitz, cello. If the string parts were not invariably perfectly attuned to each other, the slight divergencies only contributed to the general interest.

After the politesse of Faure, Bartok’s jazzy “Contrasts” for clarinet, violin and piano, commissioned by Joseph Szigeti and Benny Goodman in 1938, cleared the air of any lingering Romanticism. David Schifrin’s virtuoso clarinet rejoiced in the biting arabesques and songful legato lines, ably seconded by Golub at the piano and Pauk on violin.

Tchaikovsky’s busy “Souvenir of Florence” provided ample exercise for a string sextet led by Miriam Fried with fine zest and flair, with Masuko Ushioda’s second violin, the violas of Ohyama and Nobuko Imai and the cellos of Haimovitz and Ralph Kirshbaum contributing to the sunny effects and lively sonorities.