New Worlds and Forgotten Shores

Sound

ALTHOUGH THE LARGELY CONSERVATIVE TASTES of local music lovers constitute a limiting factor in San Diego’s two great classical music festivals, hosted by Mainly Mozart and La Jolla Music Society, both events occasionally make surprising excursions into adventurous programming. Mainly Mozart musical director David Atherton frequently captains his crew into forgotten inlets, where composers such as Ludwig Spohr and Antonio Salieri mope about. And when Mozart himself appears on the shore, his music is not always familiar. Sometimes he’s even been “finished,” as in June’s remarkable Concerto in D for Violin and Piano. Audiences heard a work they will very likely never hear again.

Much as Mainly Mozart looks backward toward the big “M,” SummerFest usually revisits the “3 B’s”——Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. This year’s event (August 3-26) is titled “Bach, Beethoven . . . and Beyond”——but it’s the last “B” that pushes the envelope. One concert features music by Chen-Yi and Esa-Pekka Salonon, plus the West Coast premiere of two commissioned works by Joan Tower and Mark Neikrug (August 17). Another evening (August 24) brings a progressive modern-dance company called BodyVox.

SummerFest’s charismatic artistic director, famed Taiwanese- American violinist Cho-Liang Lin, marks his seventh year at the helm. A special concert honoring him will most certainly reflect his tastes. “I want to play works I love, with colleagues I admire and find congenial,” Lin says. “So our journey starts with a paraphrase of Mozart’s The Magic Flute [by Julian Malone] and ends with the sublime Brahms G Major Sextet, my personal greeting and embrace for the SummerFest audience.” That August 8 concert also features music by Ravel and Bartók.

Lin defends some of the festival’s glitzier marketing titles: “Beethoven I——The Young Hero,” “Beethoven II——Immortal Beloved,” “Beethoven III——Apotheosis.” “With the mini-Beethoven series,” he says, “I am giving the audience a look at representative chamber works from the three distinct periods of Beethoven’s creative life. It is difficult in only three concerts. If one thinks calling the early days of Beethoven in Vienna ‘Young Hero’ a purely romantic notion, then blame Maynard Solomon for naming Beethoven so in his biography. And the fact is the Septet we have on that program is written between his first and second symphony. By then, the young [heroic] Ludwig certainly had begun to venture forth more than any composer previously.

“The whole idea of the festival is to present a wide range of music and styles mixing works for voice, piano, strings, percussion and narration, woven into a coherent texture over a 21-day period. And to that extent, I think the content of SummerFest has achieved that.”

Indeed, festival programming embraces music by Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber (August 10), an all-Schubert evening (August 12), a whole concert of Shakespeare lyrics set to music by an amazing array of composers (August 18) and some veddy, veddy British composers, Sir Edgar Elgar and Sir William Walton——although be warned: One Walton piece, Façade (1929), with its amusingly surreal spoken recitations, is probably the first appearance of hip-hop known in English.

There are also big baroque cycles this year——Vivaldi’s The Seasons with Sarah Chang (August 15) and the complete Bach Brandenburg Concertos (August 26). The established artists make a dazzling lineup. Seeing is believing at ljms.com.

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