MUSIC REVIEW : Enchanting Salute to Messiaen

In the United States, the music of Olivier Messiaen has been more frequently lauded than performed. American orchestras and choruses have conscientiously eschewed the French composer’s more expansive works, although for a time in the 1960s, some organ recitalists programmed his organ suites to prove they were au courant .

Wednesday night at Sherwood Auditorium, the La Jolla SummerFest finally saluted Messiaen, who died in April at age 83, with a taut, bracing performance of his “Quartet for the End of Time.” The 50-minute, eight-movement mystical meditation, written in 1941, is a highly programmatic yet wonderfully abstract interpretation of an apocalyptic vision found in the Book of Revelation.

The four SummerFest musicians, violinist Julie Rosenfeld, clarinetist David Shifrin, cellist David Finckel and pianist David Golub, mastered the work’s complex rhythmic challenges and quicksilver transformations of mood. And, they sustained the intensity of the composer’s exquisitely drawn-out paeans, in which the passage of time is supposed to evaporate in endless melody.

But only Rosenfeld achieved the luminosity the composer intended. In her final movement solo, she steadily increased the intensity and fervor of her long ascending line to attain the spiritual transformation that is the heart of the work, a transition Finckel did not make in his cautiously plotted solo in the fifth movement.

In Shifrin’s extended unaccompanied solo, the clarinetist crafted amazing timbral transformations--he started tones at the absolute threshold of audibility--but his asymmetrical arabesques lacked the supple rhythmic freedom that is essential to Messiaen’s style. From the piano Golub coaxed appropriately mist-shrouded accompaniments or bell-like clusters; his equanimity provided the work’s essential grounding. If it was not a definitive performance, it was sympathetic and at times illuminating.

On the program’s opening half, flutist Carol Wincenc and pianist Andre Previn gave Prokofiev’s Flute Sonata in D Major a jaunty, sardonic reading. Previn found the dense accompaniment congenial, and, unlike many flutists, Wincenc avoided the instrument’s typical monochromatic, all-purpose timbre. Their sophisticated though none too urgent approach to the worldly, neoclassical sonata provided an apt foil to the Messiaen.

Violinist Sheryl Staples and violist Toby Hoffman opened the eclectic concert with a virtuoso but unforced account of Mozart’s Duo for Violin and Viola in B-flat, K. 424. Staples showed passion and panache, while Hoffman’s rich sonority and varied palette of colors provided ample foundation for Staples’ flights.