SummerFest ’90 Leans Toward a Modern Thrust : Music: The selection of Andre Previn as the first composer-in-residence is designed to ‘make La Jolla audiences give new works a chance.’

If artistic director Heiichiro Ohyama were more complacent, he would relax and bask in the success of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s annual summer festival.

Now in its fifth year, SummerFest, which opens Friday night at Sherwood Auditorium, has attained an enviable record in the crowded summer festival market.

SummerFest’s talent bank alone attests to the cachet of Ohyama’s 12-day festival. Besides the presence of Andre Previn in multiple musical roles, the 30-musician roster includes pianists Emanuel Ax and Andre Michel Schub; violinists Cho-Liang Lin and Gyorgy Pauk; cellists Carter Brey and Gary Hoffmann, as well as flutist Carol Wincenc.

“I think La Jolla is one of the better-organized chamber music festivals,” said Lin, who made his SummerFest debut last season. “The hospitality is first rate, which makes a difference in our well-being. I left last year’s festival feeling very happy about the whole festival. Of course, the most important ingredient is who else is playing. Early on, I saw the names of Manny Ax, Andre Previn and Gyorgy Pauk. It’s the (presence of) outstanding players that makes it truly enticing.”

Ohyama stressed that the compatibility of the musicians he invites is foremost in his mind when planning a festival.

“Equally important is whether everybody can work together and put the music together in a very short time,” Ohyama explained. The authoritative but mild-mannered director has demonstrated a knack for choosing the right mix of performers. Participants from past years regularly praise SummerFest’s backstage harmony.

“The festival’s atmosphere is conducive to good music-making. There wasn’t that certain negative competitive quality, which can exist when musicians get together,” noted violist Toby Hoffmann, who this summer has already participated in a handful of festivals from Flagstaff, Ariz., to Kuhmo, Finland.

If Ohyama’s festival runs as smoothly as the typical SummerFest patron’s Mercedes-Benz, what more could the artistic director want? The answer to that question lies in the curious choice of Andre Previn as SummerFest’s first composer-in-residence. Known primarily as a conductor and secondarily as a pianist, Previn is least recognized as a composer of serious music. Although his canon of compositions is notably modest, Ohyama is banking on Previn’s charisma to sell his tradition-bound SummerFest audience on music by contemporary composers.

“When I asked Andre if he would be composer-in-residence, he thought I was crazy,” Ohyama said. Previn, a colleague of Ohyama’s who performed in SummerFest two season ago, agreed to the unusual offer when he understood the logic of Ohyama’s strategy.

“We need to work to make La Jolla audiences give new works a chance,” Ohyama explained. “We need to create both an appetite and a willingness for this music.”

Ohyama knows his audience well. In SummerFest’s second season, a performance of Anton Webern’s mildly dissonant “Five Movements for String Quartet” was met with a chorus of audible grumbles from the audience. Last year, sensitive to his audience’s conservative musical taste, Ohyama had composer Mel Powell give a short talk to the audience before the Colorado Quartet played his dense, Schoenbergian String Quartet.

“Previn is a good speaker and someone the audience will listen to,” said Ohyama, “and his music is easy to assimilate.”

If Previn makes the concept of a composer-in-residence palatable, Ohyama sees more adventurous choices for SummerFest’s future resident composers. He will also gamble on commissioning works for the festival, by definition an unpredictable element of programming. Always a cautious planner, Ohyama knows that moving too far ahead of his audience could mean a reduction of financial backing and a slump at the box office.

Said Hoffmann, “In Europe, people don’t have to worry about ticket sales because of government support of the arts. So they can play a lot of 20th-Century music and do experimental things.”

Performers such as flutist Wincenc tend to be eager to play new repertory and are less forgiving to stubborn audience attitudes.

“We are almost at the end of the 20th Century,” Wincenc said. “People who have a problem with 20th-Century music had better get on the stick because it’s almost over.”

When Ohyama asked her to play Debussy’s quintessential Impressionist flute solo, “Syrinx,” Wincenc insisted she perform Edgar Varese’s more challenging “Density 21.5.”

“Varese liked to call his flute piece the ‘anti-Syrnix’ because he wanted people to know that not all music was written to conjure up wood nymphs,” Wincenc explained. She added that Ohyama liked the idea immediately, and he also agreed to program Vincent Persichetti’s Serenade for Flute and Harp at the SummerFest fund-raising concert.

Among Ohyama’s less controversial innovations for this year’s SummerFest is a residency for nine young performers who will study under SummerFest artists during the festival. They will be presented in concert Aug. 26 at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium, performing with pianist David Golub and violinist Julie Rosenfeld. This “rising stars” program includes La Jolla pianist Kenneth Bookstein and San Diego Symphony principal violist Yun Jie Liu.

For the first time at SummerFest, members of the San Diego Symphony will perform in a chamber orchestra concert. On Aug. 26 both Previn and Ohyama will conduct Mozart at Mandeville Auditorium. Ohyama stated that his guest appearance on the symphony podium last fall made negotiating this collaboration with executive director Wesley Brustad easier.

Ohyama likes to compare SummerFest favorably to the more established and larger Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, in which he participated as a violist for some nine seasons.

“Santa Fe is where I learned how to create a viable festival. I feel that the quality of we have done as we enter into our fifth year can hold its own against Santa Fe, which is now in its 18th season.