COMMENTARY : SummerFest a Classic Success : Concerts: San Diego’s premier musical event achieves excellence while challenging its audience.

Despite being a boom time for stock traders and corporate raiders, the flush and flashy ‘80s proved a treacherous course for classical music in San Diego.

During that decade, several chamber orchestras were launched, only to disappear in an eddy of red ink. The entire 1986-87 season of the San Diego Symphony was sacrificed on the bloody altar of chronic mismanagement and a bitter labor contract strife. In 1988, the disastrous, underfunded Batiquitos Festival of the Arts, which promised caviar but served baloney sandwiches, sullied the county’s artistic reputation among performers and master teachers across the country.

While these fiascoes multiplied, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society bucked the trend and launched SummerFest in 1986 with Heiichiro Ohyama as artistic director. Charting a prudent course that balanced musical excellence with fiscal responsibility, the annual summer chamber music festival has become San Diego’s premier musical event.

Ohyama’s festival has earned its kudos.

Andre Previn, who has either played or conducted in five of SummerFest’s seven seasons, calls it the best-run chamber music festival he knows.

“Ohyama is a combination of two things not usually found in musicians,” Previn said. “He is both a wonderful performer and a great organizer. All of us tend to be slightly negligent in the organizational end, but he is like a computer.”

The La Jolla society started modestly with a 10-day festival of eight concerts, and, over the years, SummerFest has kept its expansion within its means. This year, it boasts 10 concerts spread over three weeks (today-Aug. 30), but more importantly, the festival has broadened its scope significantly.

To augment the typical festival’s educational offering of master classes with visiting artists, in 1990 SummerFest started a residency program for eight to 10 promising young musicians. After intensive tutoring, these rising stars are integrated into concerts with the festival’s most seasoned performers with exciting results. SummerFest has also improved on the standard and ubiquitous preconcert lecture by adding symposiums with artists and musicologists to broaden laymen’s understanding of how music gets from the page to the stage.

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In the touchy arena of programming, Ohyama has taken his audience’s innate conservatism into account without simply caving in to it. Although the artistic director has not embraced the avant-garde--with the UC San Diego music department up the hill, that would be bringing the proverbial coals to Newcastle--he has built significant challenge into every season.

For two years, Ohyama included a resident composer, the usual vehicle to infuse new repertory into a festival. But neither the stringent serialism of Mel Powell nor Previn’s instant accessibility solved the problem. These composer-in-residence attempts seemed strained and overly self-conscious. Ohyama has chosen instead a more low-keyed approach. Without fanfare, he has deftly planted serious, infrequently performed 20th-Century works in the course of the festival: a Ginastera string quartet, the Schnitke Piano Quintet as well as examples of the Second Viennese School. This season, Messiaen’s landmark “Quartet for the End of Time” will challenge the ears of the Dvorak-doting SummerFest patrons.

Because Ohyama over the years has won the trust of SummerFest audiences, they take these challenges with unexpected grace. Performers regularly play to a full house.

The caliber of SummerFest’s artist roster is nonpareil. Among this season’s two dozen notable performers are Previn as pianist, violinist Cho-Liang (Jimmy) Lin, cellist Gary Hoffman, clarinetist David Shifrin, oboist Allan Vogel, pianist Yefim Bronfman and the Orion String Quartet.

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The festival’s unhurried pace allows the musicians to prepare each program rigorously and thoroughly, an aspect regularly cited by returning artists as a cardinal reason to accept a return invitation.

San Diego’s artistic excesses of the last decade have given way to the widespread austerity of the ‘90s, but the La Jolla Chamber Music Society has kept SummerFest on a steady course, insulated from both fad and retrenchment.

Like the memory of mother’s cooking, it does not disappoint.

Details of SummerFest ’92

WHEN: Today-Aug. 30.

WHERE: All concerts at Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s Sherwood Auditorium (700 Prospect St., La Jolla).

WHO: Today, 8 p.m.: Brahms Piano Quartet, Op. 26; Bartok String Quartet No. 4 with the Orion String Quartet.

Aug. 16, 2 p.m.: Children’s Marionette Show with Jim Gamble Puppets in Grieg’s “Peer Gynt.”

Aug. 16, 7 p.m.: Mozart C Major Quartet (“Dissonant”), Mendelssohn D Minor Piano Quartet and Schoenberg’s “Verklaerte Nacht” with the Orion String Quartet, violist Paul Neubauer and cellist Andres Diaz.

Aug. 19, 8 p.m.: Rising stars concert with pianist David Golub in Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet and the Mendelssohn String Quintet No. 2.

Aug. 21, 8 p.m.: Beethoven String Trio, Op. 9, No. 1, Chopin G Minor Cello Sonata and Tchaikovsky Piano Trio with pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Cho-Liang Lin, and cellist Gary Hoffman.

Aug. 22, 8 p.m.: Arensky Piano Trio, Shostakovich Octet, Op. 11, and Ravel’s Piano Trio with pianist Andre Previn, violinist Julie Rosenfeld and cellist Gary Hoffman.

Aug. 23, 4 p.m.: Heiichiro Ohyama conducts chamber orchestra in Vivaldi Concerto for Three Violins, Telemann G Major Viola Concerto with violist Toby Hoffman and Hindemith “Trauermusik.”

Aug. 26, 8 p.m.: Prokofiev Flute Sonata with flutist Carol Wincenc and Messiaen Quartet “For the End of Time.”

Aug. 28, 8 p.m.: Rising stars concert with Andre Previn in Brahms F Minor Piano Quintet and cellist David Finckel in Schubert C Major Cello Quintet.

Aug. 29, 8 p.m.: Debussy Piano Trio, Poulenc Sextet for Piano and Winds and Dvorak A Major Piano Quintet with pianist Wu Han, violinists Sheryl Staples and Julie Rosenfeld, violist Toby Hoffman and cellist Gary Hoffman.

Aug. 30, 7 p.m.: Brahms G Major String Quintet and Spohr Nonet in F Major for Strings and Winds.

For dates and times of open rehearsals, master classes with Heiichiro Ohyama, David Finckel, Julie Rosenfeld and clarinetist David Shifrin, as well as symposiums with Andre Previn and David Golub, call the La Jolla Chamber Music Society at 459-3724.