Klezmer Livens Up Chamber Music Festival

Klezmer has been moving up in the world. At one time the term was practically pejorative. Leonard Bernstein’s father, for instance, was horrified that his son wanted to become a musician, equating music with the klezmorim, or impoverished troupes of itinerant Jewish musicians who wandered the old country playing weddings and bar mitzvahs.

But these days, not only have the wailing clarinets and infectious rhythms of klezmer become a favorite of world music, the genre has entered into the realm of art music as well. There is avant-garde klezmer of the New York downtown club scene; there is operatic klezmer (Paul Schoenfeld’s “The Merchant and the Pauper” was given its premiere by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June); and there was Oswoldo Golijov’s gripping “The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind” for clarinet and string quartet featured at SummerFest La Jolla on Sunday afternoon.

Golijov’s 1994 quintet is a stunner, and the excited audience reaction was fascinating to witness. Its standing ovation was not typical of the polite society that regularly supports an elevated chamber music festival in this wealthy resort. People in the packed Sherwood Auditorium stood, not just clapping but smiling, talking, laughing, making contact with one another. It was remarkable for a community where social distinctions tend to be fairly obvious--a true communal experience.

The good-natured composer, a young Argentine who lives in the Boston area, told us in a preconcert talk not to expect to find a Jewish composer with the calm, unquestioning devoutness of, say, an Arvo Part or an Olivier Messiaen. More typical is a Bernstein who argues with God, as in the “Kaddish” Symphony. Eight hundred years ago, Isaac the Blind, a Kabbalist rabbi saw in the Hebrew alphabet all events past and present in the universe. It was an image Golijov liked for summing up hundreds of centuries of Jewish experience, which he says was the tall order he gave himself for a half-hour quintet.

“Isaac the Blind” does nothing of the sort, of course, but it does do something significant. It uses the musical languages of today--gathering together styles ranging from Modernism to Minimalism to jazz and, obviously, klezmer--to express very basic emotions of a culture--from deep prayer to joyous dance--and then to show them as universal. There is plenty of symbolism in “Isaac the Blind” if a listener wants it. Eerie harmonics in the string quartet represent a cosmic flute, perhaps the ineffable voice of God floating in indistinct pitch. From this, the clarinet rises into a wild dance tune, man asserting his own place in the cosmos. There are, in the five movements, joys, tears, mysteries and some astonishing climaxes.

For the performance, the St. Lawrence String Quartet was vivid, arresting. Todd Palmer, the young clarinetist, proved a considerable virtuoso (he has to maneuver four different-sized instruments and play the bass clarinet in a breathtaking high range), but a less comfortable stylist. The piece has attracted great klezmer clarinetists (David Krakauer has recorded it with the Kronos Quartet for Nonesuch), and Palmer competed by punching out phrases as aggressively as he could. I suspect that the music is strong enough not to need that extra effort.

The Sunday program was filled out by Richard Strauss and Brahms. It opened with a wonderfully luxuriant performance of the string sextet from “Capriccio,” played by the St. Lawrence violist Paul Neubauer and cellist David Finckel (who is co-director of the festival with pianist Wu Han).

After intermission came Brahms’ G-minor Piano Quartet. The players--Christopher O’Riley (piano), Julie Rosenfeld (violin), Neubauer and Andres Diaz (cello)--are estimable young chamber musicians and soloists who frequent the chamber music festival circuit. Brahms was boldly, securely attacked. There was a sense of size and power to this score, one of Brahms’ most enduring chamber works, and it can take just about anything thrown at it.

But the music seemed to go, if not nowhere, nowhere distinctive. It felt like a performance sensibly exciting and professional but without nuance or a particular point of view. The quartet treated the gypsy finale, for instance, to the same kind of punchiness that Palmer gave Golijov, thrilling but a bit contrived. These are, after all, busy players with a summer full of festivals and always a plane to catch. They must travel with a kit of expedient solutions to any musical situation. And perhaps that is why the wild, unkempt klezmorim of old seem so romantic to us now, given the kind of slick, reliable professionals our itinerant players have become.