MUSIC REVIEW : The Moon Is Up for La Jolla’s Music Fest

Heiichiro Ohyama, masterminding SummerFest ‘92, revealed what may be celestial connections.

The artistic director of La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s series timed the final rapturous notes of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Verklaerte Nacht” to a made-to-order, archly romantic, ghostly gorgeous moonrise.

The Schoenberg (translated “Transfigured Night”) was beautifully performed by a sextet of string players in Sherwood Auditorium for Sunday’s evening concert.

The audience, surely captivated by the tone poem and satisfied with the concert overall, walked out into a transfigured night themselves.

Perhaps the Schoenbergian moon was mere coincidence, but the program and Ohyama’s choice of performers seemed blessed from above. You know you’ve attended an extraordinary concert when, out of three works offered, a Mozart string quartet falls to third place, left behind by, of all things, a piano quartet written by Felix Mendelssohn at age 16.

Sunday’s program continued the festival’s presentation of composers’ early works. Friday’s opening night concert included a quartet written by Rossini at age 12, and an 1895 quartet composed by Ernst von Dohnyani at 17 will open Wednesday’s concert.

The addition of youthful works fits the youthfulness of the festival musicians, a directorial decision that has its strong and weak points. A quartet more seasoned than the Orion String Quartet, for example, might have made a more relaxed and pristine job of Mozart’s “Dissonant” Quartet in C Major, K. 465. But Todd Phillips and Daniel Phillips on violins, violist Catherine Metz and cellist Timothy Eddy kept the work buoyant, seemed to breathe as one and were expert at clean attacks and finishes.

The Orion fared better with the denser textures of Schoenberg, recalling their Friday success with Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet. For “Verklaerte Nacht,” they probed the late romantic tone poem’s shifting intensities and moods of remorse and redemption, combining desirable restraint with passion. To complete the sextet, they were joined by Paul Neubauer on viola and Andres Diaz on cello, two young performers on the festival roster.

Neubauer and Diaz performed earlier in the evening with violinist Hamao Fujiwara and pianist David Golub for a rousing Mendelssohn’s Piano Quartet in B minor.

With less reticence than they performed a Brahm’s piano quartet Friday, this foursome took to heart the composer’s teen-age ostentation and delivered with gusto the concert’s surprise hit. Fujiwara’s solo segments in particular came forth with ardent expression.

One wouldn’t wish to place Golub in the category of old-timer, because he isn’t old, but his vast professional experience and enormous accomplishment as a pianist gave this performance its polish, impetus and thrill. The music is amusingly brazen in the piano part (Mendelssohn was a virtuoso pianist), which rolled through sensational full keyboard runs and extravagant arpegghios.

Golub’s delivery was brilliant and appropriately swank.