Music : Week II of SummerFest in La Jolla: First-Rate, Friendly

Controversy and avant-gardism are two elements you are not going to find at SummerFest, the warm-weather chamber-music series in this Eden by the Pacific.

Now in its sixth season, the little August festival, held in auditoriums both in downtown La Jolla and out at the nearby campus of UC San Diego, specializes in first-rate performances given by an international coterie of musical colleagues. There may or may not be hanky-panky but there is certainly no in-fighting--at least that we can see--or rabid contemporaneity.

The 1991 series began its second week Friday night, with a Copland-Mozart-Haydn chamber-orchestra concert in Mandeville Auditorium at the university.

Two conductors presided--Heiichiro Ohyama, artistic director of the festival, and Andre Previn, who might be called, though he isn’t, principal guest conductor. The performances, of a standard, ho-hum program (on paper), proved perfectly splendid.

Ohyama, in a very few visible seasons, seems to have developed into a serious podium personality.

The two works he led Friday, Copland’s “Quiet City” and Haydn’s C-major Cello Concerto, showed him in thorough command of himself and his instrumental resources. He coaxed both languor and urgency from his players in the popular Copland piece, tight architectonics, detailed lyricism and soloist-friendly balances in the concerto.

Gary Hoffman, a young veteran of these summer musical orgies, was the probing and inspired protagonist in the Haydn work, eschewing all effortfulness in its fast passages, producing songful and beautifully contrasted linearity throughout. Best of his many virtues is the courage he shows in specializing in that whole continent of dynamics between mezzo-piano and pianissimo.

Previn’s soloist in Mozart’s G-major Violin Concerto was Cho-Liang Lin, who in his generation has made a signature-piece of this work in much the same way that, long ago, Isaac Stern did, in his heyday. On Friday, Lin again combined spontaneity and polish, heat and light, immaculate passage-work and warm tone.

The accompanying, very accomplished instrumental body, made up of fewer than 30 members of the San Diego Symphony, gave Lin and Previn full attention and splendiferous sound.

At the end of the evening, the same body, with the addition of Hoffman and Lin sitting in back chairs of their respective sections, produced a neat and loving performance of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29. Call it cronyism, collegiality or just friends making music together--the spirit of family at this annual meeting seems to make the La Jolla experience unique.

The festival continues through Friday night.