MUSIC REVIEW : Right Chemistry Turns Concert Into Sparkling Event

LA JOLLA — In chamber music, chemistry is almost everything. Technique and stylistic integrity cannot be ignored, but achieving the right chemistry among performers makes the difference between a cluster of zircons and the Hope diamond.

The trio of pianist Yefim Bronfman, violinist Cho-Liang Lin and cellist Gary Hoffman creates an incendiary chemistry, which it amply demonstrated Friday and Saturday at the La Jolla SummerFest. To a full house at Sherwood Auditorium Friday night, the powerful trio gave an explosive performance of Tchaikovsky’s A Minor Piano Trio.

Bronfman’s aggressive, deep-toned pianism needed the balance of Hoffman’s robust, singing sonority and Lin’s sweetly incisive lyricism. In the Tchaikovsky work, which the ensemble endowed with symphonic proportions, the three musicians presented fiercely independent profiles. Yet their strengths merged into a surprisingly cohesive whole.

The trio brought the same virtues--vibrant declamation, soaring lyricism, rich sonorities and eloquent phrasing--to Saturday night’s D Minor Piano Trio by Anton Arensky, but Arensky’s quaint paint-by-number still life is not in the same league with Tchaikovsky’s subtle, finely-detailed landscape. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber, Arensky had an ear for a comely melody, but like Britain’s facile mega-hit composer, Arensky didn’t know what to do with a great tune except reiterate it.

Hoffman was joined by violinist Julie Rosenfeld and pianist Andre Previn on Saturday for yet another trio, Ravel’s transcendent A Minor Piano Trio. Despite Hoffman’s impressive contribution, this ensemble’s chemistry ignited no fires. Rosenfeld and Previn proved sympathetic to Ravel’s droll, modal idiom, but neither conveyed the breathless urgency beneath the work’s shimmering surface.

Artistic director Heiichiro Ohyama, who regularly unearths obscure works to enliven the festival programming, offered Dmitri Shostakovich’s rarely heard Prelude and Scherzo, Op. 10, Saturday night. Ohyama, assisted by violinists Rosenfeld and Sheryl Staples and five SummerFest students in residence, took the string octet from the composer’s student days on a daredevil chase.

As a prelude to Friday’s grand Tchaikovsky Piano Trio, cellist David Finckel played Chopin’s G Minor Cello Sonata sensitively, albeit circumspectly. An intrepid ensemble player--he is a member of the Emerson String Quartet--Finckel did not project the warm, lavish sound that one associates with Romantic literature. Taiwanese pianist Wu Han accompanied him brilliantly, but at times overpowered the soloist.

Friday’s program-opener was Beethoven’s G Major String Trio, Op. 9, No. 1, which violinist Hamao Fujiwara, violist Toby Hoffman, and Finckel dispatched with appropriate elegance and spirit.