SOLD-OUT SERIES : SECOND SUMMERFEST OF CHAMBER MUSIC BEGINS

The enterprising but conservative La Jolla Chamber Music Society has, over the years, produced concerts in all areas of San Diego County, both by international and home-grown ensembles. Chamber music flourishes particularly well, however, in the society’s home hall, Sherwood Auditorium at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

It was flourishing wildly at the opening concert of SummerFest ’87 Saturday night. The event, like the six scheduled to follow, was sold-out in advance. Audience overflow took over part of the stage where more than 30 extra seats had been placed. Would-be attenders stood in line outside the auditorium.

The artistic director of the series, Heiichiro Ohyama, who is also principal violist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a young conductor on the rise, seems to have arranged his second SummerFest programs with an eye--and ear--toward establishing a no-nonsense image for his young 10-day festival.

Unlike previous summer concerts here, all seven performances take place at the museum. There are to be no forays into other parts of San Diego. Distracting and confusing university connections are not explored, though some UCSD faculty members do appear on the programs, along with other Ohyama colleagues from Los Angeles, Santa Fe and points east. The musical agendas are mixed, eclectic, not stodgy, but not yet adventurous.

At the official opening Saturday--there had been a prelude concert for patrols at a private home, Friday--the performances of Beethoven’s Opus 1, No. 1, Trio, with Ernst von Dohnanyi’s Opus 1 Piano Quintet and Schubert’s C-major String Quintet were dedicated by the players to the memories of cellist Gabor Rejto and Peter Schidlof, beloved members of the international chamber music community.

The tributes were fitting and touching. In the Schubert work, for instance, Peter Rejto played his late father’s Montagnana cello in the same part Gabor Rejto took in the recording of the work made with colleagues of the Heifetz-Piatigorsky team, two decades ago.

Yet no maudlin moment marked this performance or the ones preceding. With young Rejto, violinists Gyorgy Pauk and Miriam Fried, violist Robert Vernon and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum achieved an impassioned, propulsive and musically motivated reading, yet one as poignant for its restraint as for its depth of feeling. These five played like old friends, which in some cases they may not be.

Fireworks came before intermission, when pianist Jeffrey Kahane was the principal arsonist in a performance of the Dohnanyi Quintet, written when the late pianist/conductor/composer was a hot-blooded 17-year-old. The historical fact is this work is the musical equivalent of purple prose; the reality is that it contains as much fun as any amusement park. Kahane, with violinists Masuko Ushioda and Pauk, violist Vernon and cellist Ronald Leonard, made it first glow, then flame.

To open the concert, Kahane, with Fried and Kirshbaum, brought elegance and handsomely controlled technique to the Beethoven work. His piano, incidentally, was a Falcone.