A Different Flavor for SummerFest

Three years ago, when David Fincke and Wu Han took over the artistic direction of what was essentially a chamber music festival for locals, SummerFest La Jolla immediately took on a high artistic profile, a new life. Then suddenly last summer they resigned mysteriously, unhappily. But not, it appears, disastrously.

The La Jolla Chamber Music Society, which runs the festival, quickly found an even higher profile artistic director, the popular violinist Cho-Liang Lin. The new life continues, and the three-week chamber music festival opened over the weekend with an additional spring in its step.

On paper, much looks the same. As in the past three years, the performers are a mix of noted chamber players, soloists and principal players from major orchestras. The host of surrounding community talks, workshops and events continue. Once more, a couple of guest composers join the genial composer and festival regular Bruce Adolphe. And this year’s theme, “Brahms and His Legacy,” is not a huge change of emphasis from last year’s “Mendelssohn and Friends.”

But Saturday night in the Sherwood Auditorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the feeling and the music-making had a distinctly different flavor. For one thing, there were more West Coast musicians in the mix, with UCLA violinist Mark Kaplan and Los Angeles Philharmonic assistant principal cellist Ben Hong joining the likes of New York Philharmonic principal violist Cynthia Phelps and cellist Carter Brey.

Joining in, as well, for a piano quartet by Mozart and a string quintet by Brahms were such soloists as Lin, violinist Kyoko Takezawa and pianist Andre-Michel Schub, along with longtime Guarneri String Quartet violist Michael Tree.

And then there was the electric guitar. One of the guest composers is Steven Mackey, who is finding new hybrids between rock guitar (of which he is a virtuoso) and sophisticated musical structures (he teaches at Princeton). The other guest composer, not on hand this evening, is Mark O’Connor, the famed country fiddler who crosses over into classical, and who also happens to be a recent San Diego transplant. Not only are both genre-breaking composers, they are performing musicians and they will jam together at a special event next week.

And so, between the conventional chamber music pleasures of Mozart and Brahms, the festival took a plunge Saturday night with “Physical Properties,” a piece Mackey wrote to perform with the Kronos Quartet in 1992. Mackey describes the piece as relating to yet another side of his life, the 45-year-old composer having been a professional freestyle skier in his youth.

The physical properties he has in mind are his idea of perfection--careening down a mountain, “head over heels, arms and legs flailing, onlookers gasping,” he writes in his program note. The object is to arrive with a smile on his face and not a flake of snow on his body.

“Physical Properties” does its share of careening in its 15-minute descent. Mackey’s score is all jerky energy, full of short, sharp, jumbled gestures that carry a listener along less for their inherent individual interest than for their gathering momentum and the way they play off each other. There is also the gleeful snottiness of the intrusive rock guitar that eggs the string quartet on to rudeness while still managing to acknowledge the string quartet’s more gentrified world--a real rock for grown-ups.

It takes a Kronos to really pull such a thing off. And if Kronos ever needs a new violinist, Takezawa--who played the first violin part--proved as exciting, if not even more so, than Mackey himself. The others--Kaplan, Phelps and Hong--seemed all game but slightly shellshocked. The audience, whose average age is certainly older than that of these performers or composers, was not shellshocked at all but responded with outright glee.

One element perhaps lacking this summer (a single concert is not, of course, enough to judge) is the level of polish that has characterized the festival in the past three years. For instance, in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in E-flat major, K. 493, Schub contributed glittering, elegant--if slightly flustered--playing, but he was consistently too loud, a particular shame given the sheer musicality from the strings (Lin, Phelps and Brey).

In Brahms’ irresistibly grand Quintet in G major, Opus 111, the open enthusiasm of the players and thick lushness of the score was winning. But it could have been more gripping still had the violin and viola chairs been reversed. (The more powerful players, Takezawa and Phelps, were second to Kaplan and Tree.) And another rehearsal or two may have made the delicious rhythmic complexity inside these thick textures all the more affecting.

Still, the Brahms climaxed an evening in which there was a genuine sense of collaboration, of making music for the moment, of performers stretching themselves, exploring new territory and entering into new relationships. Lin already appears less the vacationing chamber musician who requires all the comforts of home than the tourist eager to explore, understand and enter into the life of his new surroundings. If that is so, SummerFest is in excellent hands.