MUSIC REVIEW : CHAMBER CONCERT IN LA JOLLA

Matching and mixing musical colleagues who are both expert and congenial is but the first step in mounting a chamber music festival. The second is choosing a provocative program and selecting appropriate concert sites.

In his first outing as impresario, Heiichiro Ohyama, artistic director of SummerFest ‘86, the seven-concert series sponsored by the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, seems to have succeeded on all counts. The fifth public event of the festival, Saturday night in Mandeville Auditorium at UC San Diego, displayed some of his right choices.

Though it holds only 650 listeners, Mandeville, being both wide and deep, looks larger than it is. Nevertheless, the audience gathered for the Schubert-Ravel program appeared both to fill the room to near capacity and to scrutinize the performances attentively.

The seven employed players deserved as much. At the conclusion of this evening, Jeffrey Kahane, Miriam Fried, Paul Biss, Ralph Kirshbaum and Susan Ranney--pianist, violinist, violist, cellist and bassist, respectively--achieved a mellow, energetic and serendipitous reading of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. Yet the freshness in this performance by no means indicated a lack of familiarity among the players; on the contrary, immaculate detailing, tight cohesion of all parts and a musical overview of imperturbable optimism characterized their effortless team work.

Before intermission, two duos of contrasting nature provided preludes to the quintet. At one piano, Kahane and David Golub gave songful expression, if sometimes unaligned ensemble, to Schubert’s greatly and undeservedly neglected Eight Variations on an Original Theme, D. 813. This masterful and touching set of variations in A-flat, for piano, four hands, a product of the summer of 1824, received careful, probing treatment from Kahane and Golub.

More expert as a duo, violinist Gyorgy Pauk and cellist Kirshbaum--familiar in La Jolla from appearances here in past summers as members of the touring Santa Fe Festival ensemble--nevertheless brought a lesser sense of spontaneity to their playing of Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello. Still, their understanding of the work’s many facets, as well as their clear projection of its musical content, gave palpable pleasure.